: Monday, January 19, 2009
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bossymarmalade: Okay. I haven't posted anything about the cultural appopriation conversation - Apart from the blatant, mind-boggling way in which an issue that supposedly began with an interest in respecting the Other has suddenly and aggressively become yet again All About the Hurt Feelings of White People, I am astounded that so many people wanking about their precious academic credentials are completely ignorant of how goddamn OFTEN PoC have seen these same generalized dismissals. Too emotional, too loud, too angry, too uneducated, TOO FUCKING COLOURED. -- ultranos_fic: The Current Race Discussion and That Caught-in-the-Middle Feeling - in these discussions about race and being Othered, I never see anything from the perspective of those of us who are painfully caught in the middle. Those of us who have a foot in two worlds on the race discussion. Those of us who get scrutinized in sandwich shops at the check-out line and asked "what are you?" Those of us who always have that little moment of grief and confusion whenever we fill out a form and are asked to check one box for "Race".//Yes, I'm talking about the mixed kids. -
- ithiliana: Most recent racism imbroglio - I am an academic. I teach tools for reading. I also am aware that these tools, my courses, and me exist in a racist (not only racist, but let's not derail to other areas) system which by design and function (on the micro level of literary studies, but on the whole system) was designed to exclude. And for a white academic to tell a fan of color (or white ally) that they cannot critique a book without the kind of reading I routinely assign in my college classes is just......wrong on so many levels -
- friendshipper: Cruel little lies - You want to get angry at someone -- don't get mad at the people who are doing the hard and thankless work of pointing out the places where history is still fucking us over. Get angry at the ones who did it to us instead. Get angry at all the atrocities and the genocides and all the nasty little lies that we told ourselves to justify it -- all the many ways that we wove our self-justifications into popular entertainment until we, as a society, created a whole rogues' gallery of cruel caricatures that still spring up on the written page whenever we relax and stop watching out for them. -
- shewhohashope: Cultural Appropriation and SF/F: Once More, With Feeling - If you do not care about how you represent people from marginalised ethnic groups in your writing, if you think your God given right to play with whatever cultures you like, to use people's lives and history as you see fit, to take things that people hold sacred, things which are already ignorantly dismissed, or demonised, or on the verge of being destroyed, or have already been destroyed by the dominant culture of which you are a part? To carve up pieces of people's souls to move your narrative along, is more important than taking the time to do some research, stepping back and thinking about the consequences? Then you are a racist. -
- truepenny: race(-class-sex) - "I can only grade you on what actually makes it onto the page," I used to say to my students, and that goes double for published texts. We, as authors, can't run alongside them and offer an interpretive guide when readers start to wander off our straight and narrow path. AW's reaction is just as correct, just as valid, as anybody else's. -
- cryptoxin: Cultural appropriation - It's so infuriating to see white people turn the issue into a drama with themselves at the center, where it's all about their conflict, their angst and anxiety, their needs and desires. Where people of color are only conceived of as undifferentiated masses of potential critics with impossible standards, whose sole form of engagement as readers is to scrutinize fiction for traces of racism to be denounced -
- shewhohashope: Cultural Appropriation and SF/F - Cultural appropriation is not about individuals, it's about... cultures and power (im)balances.//That's right, I'm going to try to help you understand, if you don't already, why this is such a big issue. -
- coffeeandink: Resistance and individuality - Willow, Tara, Zoe Washburne, to a lesser extent Charles Gunn and Robin Wood--they do, in fact, work for me as humans, individuals. This does not stop Tara's death from fitting into the Dead Lesbian Cliche. This does not prevent the oddity of a mostly white-washed LA, with the only significant black character coming from a poor black background -- from which he is systematically cut off in order to be integrated into the white world of the show and allowed social advancement. -
- cereta: Note to my fellow academics - One of the reasons I defend the appropriateness of academic discourse in fandom is that it is, for me, a tool of learning.//So I say this to (some) of my fellow academics: you are forgetting that part of your job. You are forgetting that expertise in one area can me squat in the area just a few sections down the shelf. You are forgetting to shut up and listen as well as speak. -