I added some concerns to the post because I think a lot of people are falling into the trap of assuming 'straight, cis, white male' = 'not diverse'. I'm a straight, cis, white, male, I'm also pretty sure I count as a diverse voice when I write about disability, or use a disabled protagonist.
While I get where you're coming from, it's derailing. Nothing in the Tempest Poject discourages people from reading about disability. QPOC, women, transfolk, etc., have plenty to say aout disability. In my decades in the disability community, I can say with confidence that it's yet another place where straight white cismen try to dominate the conversation or make it all about themselves.
Ouch! Though I think valid. But equally part of the point I'm trying to make in that I have seen diversity in literature posts and essays explicitly saying that white people don't experience discrimination, which given my personal history of facing disability discrimination I found hugely hurtful. I've faced people trying to exclude me all my life, finding myself running up against it in pro-diversity activists doesn't feel any better, even if I know and agree to a degree with what they're trying to do. Ultimately I can't get away from the feeling a movement trying to promote the inclusion of all minority voices can't afford to exclude any diverse voice.
it's derailing.
I guess ultimately I am specifically trying to derail something, but not so much the Tempest Project itself as the tendency within many of the people talking about diversity to construct it solely in terms of ethnicity or, if we're lucky, ethnicity+sexual orientation+gender issues. Diversity is much wider than simply these issues, and I worry that this will reinforce a perception of the diversity issue as a) solely ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender related (which to my mind the Tempest Project does do), and b) having been addressed; which will make it very much harder for the less well represented diversities to gain any ground. IOW I think we have to shout to make ourselves heard, and do it now.
I can say with confidence that it's yet another place where straight white cismen try to dominate the conversation or make it all about themselves.
Yes, I'd agree that has been a problem going back to the UPIAS/'white men in wheelchairs' days. But I can't be anything but what I am, and if I have a concern that diversity isn't being comprehensively addressed, then I'm forced to address it from the disabled, straight, white male background.
Yeah, I think, though, that "Um, what about disabled writers? (or, if you prefer, what about writers with disabilities?)" would have been less derailing than bringing in the fact that Hey, white cis disabled guys here! Look at us!
(Tone note: I'm not angry, nor do I think you're a bad dude. And I don't care if people think I'm pandering to men when I clarify that.)
Yeah, I guess I'm still smarting from that 'diversity faq' I read last week that claimed white people don't experience discrimination, and more damaged by the discrimination than I generally admit. I'm finding it difficult to separate the personal from the general. (Equally I think I need to declare my interest up front, which doesn't entirely help the 'it's all about me' portrayal).
But equally I'm trying to push the point (and at some point I need to write the blog post/essay that goes with it), that diversity isn't simply ethnicity+QUILTBAG issues, and I think excluding straight, cis, white males as non-diverse voices is something we need to examine critically.
In general, and in this society, white people DON'T experience discrimination FOR BEING WHITE. Not systemically, anyway, or in any way that's meaningful in a diversity context.
Agreed, OTOH, white people, including straight, cis white males, may still experience systematic and institutional discrimination and on street harassment for being diverse in other ways, and it worries me that some of the diversity debate seems to be losing sight of that, and in one case I've seen almost expressly denying it's possible.
Can you see how it might be wearying to hear this argument from so so so so so so so many white guys who don't want to be left out of the party that apparently exists when people try to encourage a leveling of the playing field?
Of course, but I keep coming back to my own reading experience as a disabled person. I can think of four novel length SF/F works with disabled protagonists from last year*, three of those were YA. I've read two, hope to remember to read the other two at some point, but have seen them extensively reviewed from the disability viewpoint. All of them are flawed to one degree or other - a significant degree of 'magical crip' protagonist in the two I haven't read, a somewhat problematic attitude to the protagonist's prosthetic in the third (it gets shot apart not once but three times). The one that comes closest to getting it right, the only one that seems to recognise disabled people as a diverse culture of their own, is Scalzi's Locked In ( and even that has issues with let's lock the messy, dribbly locked-in bodies away in the attic so we only have to deal with their sleek robot avatars).
That was it for last year and We Need Diverse Books meant I was making even more of a point of looking than usual. If this year is the same, and the one adult SF/F novel that comes genuinely close to representing my diverse community is written by a straight, cis, white, male, as Scalzi wrote last year's, then should I really choose not to read it because of who he is? Worse, all the other people who might have learnt something about my community and the way our diversity affects our lives, who may opt not to read it because of which totally unrelated ethnicity/sexuality/gender the author is. (And Lock In made mainstream bestseller lists, a book with a disabled protagonist making bestseller lists is a rare bird indeed).
Choosing to exclude a whole set of over-represented writers in the name of diversity sounds great, but if there's a very real possibility the only representation an extremely under-represented diverse community gets this year may be swallowed up in that, then I think there are real grounds to look again and see if we can't tune it to ensure no diverse group is excluded - my suggestion would be to limit yourself to 'only diverse authors, or works which address diverse subjects/communities', which surely keeps the spirit of the original proposal while trying to ensure no diverse community is left behind.
*There likely are others I didn't see reviewed, but we really are talking about a tiny number of SF/F novels with disabled protagonists in any one year.
I actually got confused as to which thread I was replying in, so the previous reply was more focussed on the literary side of things than the general discrimination and counter discrimination activism point I thought we were discussing here. In which case 'party' in reference to significant experience of disability discrimination (in my case assault, on street harassment and loss of career) suggests one of us has missed the other's point and I'm genuinely not sure which of us it is.
I'm tired, so I'm not sure I can help figure out the confusion, but I will try to be a little more Clarity-Girl-ish:
I think a few things that might not be clear from what I've said here. I will try to express them as clearly as I can.
1) Disability absolutely should be a part of any meaningful intersectionality, and you're not wrong to think so or to say so. When you posted at first, I slapped my head (metaphorically) and couldn't believe I hadn't noticed that the Tempest Project didn't say anything about disability. Normally, I'd've been all over that shit, and I was embarrassed to have missed it, and I'm glad you brought it up.
2) When you frame that desire (that *perfectly fine* desire) in terms of "Well, white/cis/male people need protecting, too, if they're disabled," then you're forefronting your experience. Rather than advocating for disabled folk and letting that reasonable advocacy stand, you appear to me to be whining because you think white/cis/male people shouldn't be penalized for being white/cis/male, which is not at all what people are talking about when they are encouraging people to read more writers who are black or latin@ or queer or trans or or or. Saying "hey, read some black woman poets for a change" is not a charge against poets who are white guys. It's an attempt to bring things into parity, not an attempt to punish (or even exclude, as much as you may think so) white men who are poets.
3) More on that last sentence: Many many people have responded to the Tempest Project by acting like people are saying not to read writing by white cis men. This is a red herring. A year off from reading white cis men will do VERY little to decrease the amount of white cis male writing an average person will read over their lifetime. In fact, speaking just for me, if I did nothing but read Tempest Project books for the rest of my life (I'm 48), I would probably not catch up to the amount of white cis men's writing I've read in my life. It would probably not even make a dent, considering all the reading I did in school (grammar, middle, high, and undergraduate) compared to how much I'm able to read now.
4) It's super-bummer-y when someone is an ally to a cause I care about (feminism, anti-racism, etc.) but can't see it as anything but a way to be allowed to participate "fully" in that thing (the "party" comment was sarcasm; fighting discrimination isn't fun, which is why I'm boggled when people play the Oppression Olympics and always want the dominant class to be winners of that contest).
I am white. I don't get to control the dialogue around anti-racism. I am a middle-class American; I try to listen to other people when they talk about class issues that don't affect me as much as they affect those people. Etcetera. And that's why I was so truly (truly!) grateful to you for reminding me about the disability angle. I'm disabled myself, as are both of my partners, to varying degrees, but I live in an ableist society and sometimes am clueless about disability stuff, and I am super-glad you caught me up short on that. Stilll? Men who insist feminism should include them / white people who insist anti-racism should consider them / etc. -- these people make me feel really dismissive and sad. So, to be perfectly honest, I've spent way way way more time talking about this with you than I usually have the emotional energy for.
Thanks for expanding, two comments (please don't feel compelled to reply to them unless you actually want to reply).
I think part of the issue may be I've been addressing the Tempest Project as a cross-diversity thing, within the wider context of We Need Diverse Books, it really didn't occur to me until I read your reply that people might be looking at it as solely relating to race and/or feminism, which may be why I'm talking about disability and everyone else's reaction is WTF?!? (And yes, this can likely be interpreted as straight, cis, white, male being clueless).
And following on from that whole wider approach, if there was an SF/F book in the last year I could use to build disability campaigning around, with the hope of improving our representation within the genre, it's John Scalzi's Locked In, yet Scalzi being straight, cis and white means it's caught up in the Tempest Project*, and the people most likely to listen are being urged not to read it. So concerns.
Thanks for contextualizing for me. The thing I take great (huge, great, ginormous) exception to is the laughable idea that there might not be any women or people of color or queer people (or some combination of those things) who are speaking just as eloquently and importantly on the subject of disability. Scalzi knows his is not the only voice out there with good things to say on the topics of the day, and he also knows that if we don't make a genuine effort to forefront those voices that are not exactly from his perspective, his voice is the one people will hear, and the one white guys -- even well-meaning white guys like you -- will take seriously, and will think is the best they can possibly offer the world.
Nothing I've said is meant to imply there aren't. I'll happily point you at several female SF/F authors whose handling of disability in their work I admire (and a couple of gay, female and disabled authors I fully expect to admire when I finally find a copy of their work, given what I've seen of them through personal contact and on the net)*. What's different with Locked In, the reason I keep talking about it in this discussion, is that it was a mainstream bestseller and I'll be shocked if it isn't a serious Hugo contender, and I can't think of a single other recently published SF/F novel with a disabled protagonist with similar impact. And impact is something you can use to thread a message into people's minds, that SF/F can feature disabled protagonists and do it well. I'd actually far prefer it had been written by a disabled person, because Scalzi can't talk about facing discrimination from a first-hand basis, which one of us could. But a Hugo nominee? Maybe a Hugo Winner? With a huge focus on disability discrimination? That's something those of us who have faced that discrimination can use as a lead-in to educate people and maybe to change the way that SF/F typically looks at/writes about disability.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2015-03-15 02:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-03-15 06:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-03-15 06:44 pm (UTC)While I get where you're coming from, it's derailing. Nothing in the Tempest Poject discourages people from reading about disability. QPOC, women, transfolk, etc., have plenty to say aout disability. In my decades in the disability community, I can say with confidence that it's yet another place where straight white cismen try to dominate the conversation or make it all about themselves.
no subject
Date: 2015-03-15 07:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-03-15 07:17 pm (UTC)Ouch! Though I think valid. But equally part of the point I'm trying to make in that I have seen diversity in literature posts and essays explicitly saying that white people don't experience discrimination, which given my personal history of facing disability discrimination I found hugely hurtful. I've faced people trying to exclude me all my life, finding myself running up against it in pro-diversity activists doesn't feel any better, even if I know and agree to a degree with what they're trying to do. Ultimately I can't get away from the feeling a movement trying to promote the inclusion of all minority voices can't afford to exclude any diverse voice.
I guess ultimately I am specifically trying to derail something, but not so much the Tempest Project itself as the tendency within many of the people talking about diversity to construct it solely in terms of ethnicity or, if we're lucky, ethnicity+sexual orientation+gender issues. Diversity is much wider than simply these issues, and I worry that this will reinforce a perception of the diversity issue as a) solely ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender related (which to my mind the Tempest Project does do), and b) having been addressed; which will make it very much harder for the less well represented diversities to gain any ground. IOW I think we have to shout to make ourselves heard, and do it now.
Yes, I'd agree that has been a problem going back to the UPIAS/'white men in wheelchairs' days. But I can't be anything but what I am, and if I have a concern that diversity isn't being comprehensively addressed, then I'm forced to address it from the disabled, straight, white male background.
no subject
Date: 2015-03-15 07:54 pm (UTC)(Tone note: I'm not angry, nor do I think you're a bad dude. And I don't care if people think I'm pandering to men when I clarify that.)
no subject
Date: 2015-03-15 08:13 pm (UTC)But equally I'm trying to push the point (and at some point I need to write the blog post/essay that goes with it), that diversity isn't simply ethnicity+QUILTBAG issues, and I think excluding straight, cis, white males as non-diverse voices is something we need to examine critically.
no subject
Date: 2015-03-15 09:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-03-16 12:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-03-16 12:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-03-16 05:50 pm (UTC)That was it for last year and We Need Diverse Books meant I was making even more of a point of looking than usual. If this year is the same, and the one adult SF/F novel that comes genuinely close to representing my diverse community is written by a straight, cis, white, male, as Scalzi wrote last year's, then should I really choose not to read it because of who he is? Worse, all the other people who might have learnt something about my community and the way our diversity affects our lives, who may opt not to read it because of which totally unrelated ethnicity/sexuality/gender the author is. (And Lock In made mainstream bestseller lists, a book with a disabled protagonist making bestseller lists is a rare bird indeed).
Choosing to exclude a whole set of over-represented writers in the name of diversity sounds great, but if there's a very real possibility the only representation an extremely under-represented diverse community gets this year may be swallowed up in that, then I think there are real grounds to look again and see if we can't tune it to ensure no diverse group is excluded - my suggestion would be to limit yourself to 'only diverse authors, or works which address diverse subjects/communities', which surely keeps the spirit of the original proposal while trying to ensure no diverse community is left behind.
*There likely are others I didn't see reviewed, but we really are talking about a tiny number of SF/F novels with disabled protagonists in any one year.
no subject
Date: 2015-03-16 06:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-03-17 04:34 am (UTC)I think a few things that might not be clear from what I've said here. I will try to express them as clearly as I can.
1) Disability absolutely should be a part of any meaningful intersectionality, and you're not wrong to think so or to say so. When you posted at first, I slapped my head (metaphorically) and couldn't believe I hadn't noticed that the Tempest Project didn't say anything about disability. Normally, I'd've been all over that shit, and I was embarrassed to have missed it, and I'm glad you brought it up.
2) When you frame that desire (that *perfectly fine* desire) in terms of "Well, white/cis/male people need protecting, too, if they're disabled," then you're forefronting your experience. Rather than advocating for disabled folk and letting that reasonable advocacy stand, you appear to me to be whining because you think white/cis/male people shouldn't be penalized for being white/cis/male, which is not at all what people are talking about when they are encouraging people to read more writers who are black or latin@ or queer or trans or or or. Saying "hey, read some black woman poets for a change" is not a charge against poets who are white guys. It's an attempt to bring things into parity, not an attempt to punish (or even exclude, as much as you may think so) white men who are poets.
3) More on that last sentence: Many many people have responded to the Tempest Project by acting like people are saying not to read writing by white cis men. This is a red herring. A year off from reading white cis men will do VERY little to decrease the amount of white cis male writing an average person will read over their lifetime. In fact, speaking just for me, if I did nothing but read Tempest Project books for the rest of my life (I'm 48), I would probably not catch up to the amount of white cis men's writing I've read in my life. It would probably not even make a dent, considering all the reading I did in school (grammar, middle, high, and undergraduate) compared to how much I'm able to read now.
4) It's super-bummer-y when someone is an ally to a cause I care about (feminism, anti-racism, etc.) but can't see it as anything but a way to be allowed to participate "fully" in that thing (the "party" comment was sarcasm; fighting discrimination isn't fun, which is why I'm boggled when people play the Oppression Olympics and always want the dominant class to be winners of that contest).
I am white. I don't get to control the dialogue around anti-racism. I am a middle-class American; I try to listen to other people when they talk about class issues that don't affect me as much as they affect those people. Etcetera. And that's why I was so truly (truly!) grateful to you for reminding me about the disability angle. I'm disabled myself, as are both of my partners, to varying degrees, but I live in an ableist society and sometimes am clueless about disability stuff, and I am super-glad you caught me up short on that. Stilll? Men who insist feminism should include them / white people who insist anti-racism should consider them / etc. -- these people make me feel really dismissive and sad. So, to be perfectly honest, I've spent way way way more time talking about this with you than I usually have the emotional energy for.
no subject
Date: 2015-03-18 08:34 pm (UTC)I think part of the issue may be I've been addressing the Tempest Project as a cross-diversity thing, within the wider context of We Need Diverse Books, it really didn't occur to me until I read your reply that people might be looking at it as solely relating to race and/or feminism, which may be why I'm talking about disability and everyone else's reaction is WTF?!? (And yes, this can likely be interpreted as straight, cis, white, male being clueless).
And following on from that whole wider approach, if there was an SF/F book in the last year I could use to build disability campaigning around, with the hope of improving our representation within the genre, it's John Scalzi's Locked In, yet Scalzi being straight, cis and white means it's caught up in the Tempest Project*, and the people most likely to listen are being urged not to read it. So concerns.
*Which Scalzi says he's okay with.
no subject
Date: 2015-03-19 03:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-03-19 04:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-03-19 04:22 am (UTC)Anyway, done here.
no subject
Date: 2015-03-15 08:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-03-15 10:04 pm (UTC)