Entries tagged with social justice

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Two Collections of Links

(I already posted these to

sqbr if you follow me there)

Tumblr:

Trans woman gets sick of transphobia on tumblr, tumblr CEO is awful about it

Worldcon:

Report on the leaked emails where the English speaking side of the committee cheerfully created political dossiers of the nominated authors based on their own projected ideas of what censorship the Chinese government might want, without feeling the need to talk to the actual Chinese people on the committee, do any real research, actually read the relevant books etc. There's been some criticism of this report itself being biased/inaccurate but I don't know of anything better with the same info.

Mary Robinette Kowal talks about similar bad behaviour she had seen from Dave McCarthy previously

Results rigged to exclude Chinese authors. This really underlines how ridiculous it is to blame literally everything on Chinese government interference, as some people still insist on doing. In what universe would they exert pressure to have less Chinese authors win awards?

Tangential but feels broadly relevant: How creators and works from New Zealand/Aotearoa were more subtly excluded at the Wellington Worldcon. This isn't equivalent to the outright censorship of the Chengdu Hugos, but it's an example of how this culture of exclusion is not a new thing or just a reaction to a "bad" foreign country.

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Random Links

Orcs, Britons, and the Martial Race Myth, Part I: A Species Built for Racial Terror

Orcs, Britons, and the Martial Race Myth, Part II: They're Not Human

Creative Interventions: A Practical Guide to Stop Interpersonal Violence
Gotta be honest, I only got partway through this, it's a bit repetitive and long winded. Also the attempt at trans inclusion is patchy. But the part I read was really thought provoking and avoided some of the major pitfalls I've seen in other similar toolkits.

And now some things I already posted to tumblr:

A discussion of Camp Which I still don't get, tbh.

mistakes don’t mean you deserve to suffer

The key to co-liberation is that it requires a commitment to and a belief in mutual benefit

the 14 properties of “ur-fascism”

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Discussion of age on tumblr

I was happy with my addition, so am going to crosspost it here. Just had my second vaccine dose so hopefully this isn't incoherent.

Advantages to younger people from knowing older ones.

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Breadtube: Left-wing Youtubers

scytale asked about Breadtube in a comment thread, and I thought I might as well make a proper post. Made with the help of Cam, who is way more into this stuff than me.

So! Breadtube is a subculture of progressive Youtube accounts, often making videos about pop culture but also history/philosophy etc. Breadtube.tv has a little more context and a long list of channels.

I've heard it criticised a lot for being very white/male etc, and since I just watch what I'm recced, my recs have that problem too. Cam recced me some more diverse channels he's heard good things about, who I've linked and will have to check out.
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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.
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FreePlay 2020

I'm currently watching Making Space: Empowering Underrepresented Voices from the online gaming convention Freeplay 2020 which is a great discussion involving voices from all over the world, and I think is worth watching for anyone interested in empowering and understanding marginalised voices, even outside the games industry.

Like on the one hand Making Space is an Australian-based organisation that used to be for "women in games and tech" but has recently broadened it's scope, partly due to the hard work of a lot of trans people. On the other hand one of the speakers is a woman in South Africa who runs a African Women in Games group that doesn't explicitly include queer people in it's mission because homosexuality is illegal in many African countries, so they have to work around it carefully. Which is the sort of thing you don't normally hear about in these kinds of discussions!

Unfortunately there's no captions. There's a chat during live talks, people didn't post much for this panel asides from a few useful links and general support.

There's a bunch of other interesting looking talks, coming up and already done. One on Disability JUST started, I asked about captions but have not gotten a reply yet. There's slides with the basic info at least. EDIT: Someone told me they can't do captions for live video but are looking into adding them to older speeches.

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Wiscon panel: City As History/City As Liberator

This was a very interesting panel, even just watching a recording, but I was SUPER tired so just let it wash over me.

The only note I took on the panel itself was: the panelists described how Americans see themselves as farmers and frontiersmen when this is blatantly untrue for most people. This reminded me of Australia.

Under the cut: links and book recs I copied from the discord chat. Mostly about the US, including some discussion of Covid. Pretty sure I missed some.
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Decolonization in SFF panel at Wiscon

I am at Wiscon online! I posted about the general con experience, including how panels work, at

alias_sqbr.

I didn't get to see this panel in person, but I watched the recorded stream and read back over the chat.
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Thoughts about Fealty Kink and Anti-Imperialist Fantasy

You can’t put themes of fealty and anti-imperialism in the same narrative box is a really interesting post, discussing the problem in the context of the Vorkosigan saga but generally worth reading.

If you wanted to put them together, and somehow do both of them justice, I think you’d have two choices:

- Positively-presented fealty angle with the Barrayarans (or at least the Vor Barrayarans) but realistically and narratively terrible actions vis-a-vis the Komarrans and the proles. Which is to say, you have created a subset of the Feudal Fantasy register within a larger picture of Realistic Ack. Many, many people will be lovely to those they consider worthy (or Us), and awful to those they consider not (or Them), so this isn’t a stretch at all. You could re-write VS canon into this mold without too much trouble, I think, but you’d need a lot more narrative criticism of the MCs than you get from LMB.

- Fealty angle where the colonized/vassal desperately wants that relationship to actually work as advertised, perhaps to the point of willful blindness, but, of course, it doesn’t. This is Realistic Ack register all the way down, and probably chock full of whump and angst. This is maybe what I was trying to do with Duv, but I’m not sure I can actually manage it.

- I don’t think you can do anti-imperialism in the Feudal Fantasy register at all (since part of the premise is that feudalism, and by extension imperialism, aren’t inherently bad), but I’m open to ideas.

One other approach I’ve enjoyed is Fealty is Fatally Flawed But Tragically Beautiful, set during the inevitable collapse of feudalism, and not saying that collapse shouldn’t happen, but still wallowing in the appeal of what feudalism remains. So vassals still feel that delicious fealty, but the actual power imbalance is in the process of disappearing. You can show how even the Nice Feudal Lords screw up, but since their power is waning it’s easier to forgive them for it, and there’s no way to fall into the Vorkosigan Saga trap of just giving the Nice Feudal Lords all the power and calling that utopia.

EDIT: Ok it has been pointed out to me that this is EXACTLY as romanticising, it's just a SAD romance. FINE.
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How we talk about the intersection of Corporate Art and Queerness

This is inspired by two flawed essays I read recently:

BaitWorks – How DreamWorks Engaged in Predatory Marketing Towards LGBT Fans

I Don't Wanna Grow Up (And Neither Can You)

Both make some good points about how media corporations manipulate fans with half-assed tokenistic gestures towards inclusivity. The second focusses more on how fans are complicit in this: the way bland, heteronormative blockbusters like the MCU get a free pass while messy indie queer women are attacked for actually trying to express themselves.

But they both also act like queer creators working within the corporate system to make moderately queer, if somewhat corporate art like Steven Universe or She-ra is exactly equivalent to entirely bland, heteronormative corporate works which only make tokenistic gestures towards queerness. Also they both erase the specific issues around non-binary representation and creators.

And I feel like this is part of a broader problem in how we discuss the intersection of Corporate Art and Queerness.
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The personal is political

Someone on tumblr linked to a screenshot of this tweet by

TheAgeofShoddy (warning for an image of a rape joke cartoon downthread) :

“The personal is political” is another way of saying that “the personal” does not really exist in those terms; it is rather public property, contested ground over which the righteous alone have special claim, and to which the individual is no more than a tactical object.

The context turned out to be pegging, lol, hooray for linking sources. But I have some vague rambly thoughts on the original tweet sans context.

My first reaction was “Ok that’s how it’s often used now, but that’s not what it meant originally”. I looked up the history to remind myself and yeah: it was about widening ‘civil rights’ to include ‘personal’ stuff like reproductive freedom and safety from domestic abuse etc. This was very important and necessary work!

On the other hand...the phrase was created by second wave feminists, who did tend towards “If you don’t live a virtuously Political Life you are a traitor to the Cause”. And that is how the phrase is often used these days, though definitely not always.

So now I’m pondering whether that’s inevitable: if any attempt to politicise the personal in order to liberate will always turn into an excuse to further criticise the downtrodden for not being Political Enough in every last facet of their lives.
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A rant about Cancel Culture I had on twitter

like a dumbass who doesn't have a PERFECTLY GOOD DREAMWIDTH where I can post AS MANY WORDS AS I WANT and EDIT THEM and NOT HAVE TO RELY ON WEIRD THREADING.

The twitter thread.

What I said:
Dear straight white cis men, please stop saying Cancel Culture is an unalloyed good. Cancel culture of the sort witnessed by, directed at, and criticised by straight white cis men *is* generally good. But cancel culture as it manifests within marginalised communities, directed at and criticised by the marginalised, can be bad. It's the same term for two different things.

Lots has been written about this problem, here's a recent example: https://dailyxtra.com/why-are-queer-people-so-mean-to-each-other-160978 But this doesn't include the problem of how quickly outsiders latch onto criticism of a visible queer person as an excuse to be awful under a veneer of wokeness. It's often not conscious, though there is absolutely a contingent of homophobic trolls who gleefully fan the flames of intercommunity strife. And it's not just queer communities this happens to.

So if you want to laugh at bad "cancel culture" takes by privileged dudes worried they might be taken to task for being creepy homophobes, go ahead. But bear in mind that the rest of us are dealing with a more messy situation, and blanket statements that equate our concerns with being a creepy homophobic privileged dude don't help.

Of course it also doesn't help that even within marginalised communities, plenty of people who get Cancelled really are That Bad, and they'll wallow in self serving "This is all the fault of cancel culture" wailing as much as anyone else. It's *messy*. Just bear that messiness in mind.

(and then I thought some of it had gone in the wrong thread and repeated it and I don't even know. Ugh, twitter)

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Links Post May 2019

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Links: Critiques of Social Justice Communities From Within

The Folly of 'Purity Politics'

Language of Appeasement
"By substituting diversity and inclusion rhetoric for transformative efforts to promote equity and justice, colleges have avoided recognizable institutional change"

Intersectional Identity and the Path to Progress

New Meta Newsletter, Signal Boosting, Linking, Dogpiling, and History

Double Standards and Diverse Media

Racism in Fandom & Fandom Discourse

I Helped Create the Milo Trolling Playbook. You Should Stop Playing Right Into It. This is interesting but comes to totally the wrong conclusions, and ignores broader social structures. For example it ignores the effect actions have on Milo versus on social prejudice in general, which the author doesn't seem to actually believe in.

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Links: Representation and Media

The Story is a Spell. The Story is a Curse.
It matters who writes us.

Shock and Care: an essay about art, politics and responsibility

Otaku Blog And Proud
A Japanese woman's complex feelings on Japanese media.

Slash and sex scenes

MM Romance Readership Survey: Results

(Really wishing dreamwidth had a queue/delayed posting right now)

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Links: General Politics and Current Affairs

My list of links to post was getting ridiculous, so I have come up with a hopefully more workable system, and will try to divide the backlog into digestible chunks.

"Current" here means, uh, 2017 in some cases >.>
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The One True Way Of Sex

Inspired by a pervocracy post:

“I’m not attracted to X, so I won’t date them”: okay then, you go ahead and do that

“I’m not attracted to X, and I demand that people who are X hear and validate this statement and give me their official permission to not be attracted to them”: please no

“I’m not attracted to X, and I demand that the entire world hear and validate this statement and declare X objectively unattractive”: you can stop now

...[I think there’s] a lot of people who never internalized that they can make choices about their sexuality.

I see this a lot when I get asks saying “men should do [very specific behavior] in relationships with women,” where it’s obvious the asker just wants her boyfriend to do that behavior but has no tools for expressing that. The universal, objective rules of society may be up for debate, but the fact that such rules exist is not.

My thoughts, including sexual trauma discussion.
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Annoying speech about "problematic" romance

I usually like Smart Bitches Trashy Books but this annoyed me.

Breaking Up with Damaging Conventions in Romance: A Conversation with Kate Cuthbert

It annoyed me to start with by being more gendered than it needed to be. Not all romances are about or by women, and even the ones that are aren't just read by women. You can talk about it being a genre mainly about/for/by women (which it is, and that's important) without overgeneralising.

But then she did that thing a lot of anti-problematic-fiction people do, where they start out saying "write about whatever you want, but think about the context of what you're writing and do it mindfully" but by the end are unambiguously saying "don't write this". She talks a good game about being ok with women's sexuality and fantasy but she clearly doesn't get it.

*** Content note: discussion of rape fantasy ***
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Thoughts on not becoming a teen-hating adult

Inspired by this post:

the whole “i used to be a teen who hated authority only to grow up to become the authority that hates teens” is a bad bad thing that practically every other generation has fallen into and we all need to make an extremely conscious effort not to repeat the fucking pattern.

Studies have shown that the shift starts to happen around age 30. If you’re close to that, make a conscious effort to be open to and accepting of younger people. I’m 31 and paying close attention to how I react to young people and new trends and shit and trying to keep myself from developing those thought patterns.

This is SUCH a thing. It was kind of horrifying watching my friends fall prey to it.

My advice as a 38 year old who has been moderately successful in not doing this: Don’t start around 30. Start as early as possible. I’ve been working on the broader problem of people treating those younger then themselves as Not People since I was six, with moderate success.

Below the cut is the approach I've taken, because I haven't seen many other people really talk about specifics. My general approach for dealing with other sorts of cultural/POV etc differences is pretty similar. It may not work for everyone, and probably doesn't work as well for me as I think it does.
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The privilege vs unprivileged dichotomy, specifically as regards non binary people

What started out as a short reply to this very good post about tumblr focussing too narrowly on identity.

(Also, I know some people find it annoying when I use "oppression" in this kind of context but I don't know of a better term that works neatly)

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