labingi

(Content warning: brief general mentions of sexual violence in fanfic/BL)

For DW folks, a lot of this fannish commentary will be old hat, and I hope you will chime in with your thoughts and experience.

I enjoy Hilary Layne’s YouTube commentary in much the way I enjoy C. S. Lewis. I usually have some philosophical disagreement but also a lot I agree with and definitely respect for her intelligence and rigor.

This video is no exception. In sum, she argues that fan fiction culture (as on Ao3), combined with an educational system that teaches literature badly, has raised a generation of readers and writers whose tastes are “self-indulgent,” prioritizing simplistic self-insertion and personal pleasure over learning and growing through literature. This, in turn, has seeped into much published fiction in a way that makes it read like bad fan fic, full of Mary Sue’s, simplistic storytelling, and a strange combination of sympathy for grotesque behavior (ex. torture) but intolerance of any (nuanced?) depiction of certain negative ideas (ex. racism, sexism).



While I think she misses some of the moral underpinnings of fan fiction, I see truth her narrative. I appreciate her framing the problem as largely having arisen in the past twenty years. Gen Z is two generations younger than me, and her video made me realize I tend to think of fandom in Gen X terms, which is utterly different from what Gen Z has experienced.

The following is some of the reflections, disagreements (or complications), and questions that arose for me watching this video. ( Read more... )

I wanted to share the interview I did for Sufficiency and Wellbeing with Charlie Toledo, the amazing director of the Suscol Intertribal Council in Napa, California. I feel deeply honored that she took this time to share her thoughts about effective activism and finding hope and joy in our troubled times.

7:45 am, and I have already been the recipient of human kindness. Asked the fellow at disability center if they could convert PDFs to Word for me so to spare me screen time during a chronic pain flare. He said the center doesn't do that, but he understands chronic pain & would do it personally. All my gratitude to this caring man!

Interesting video by Jessie Gender on the "redemption" of Syril Karn in Andor. It prompted some thinky thoughts I'd rather put here than throw at YouTube. (Andor S2 spoilers)



I agree with Jessie's contention that white men are often treated with kid gloves when it comes to creating space for them to see the error of their ways, while marginalized people's lives are dismissed and errors castigated. Jessie cites the difference in fan discourse between sorrow that Syril died without a chance at redemption and near silence that Cinta (a queer woman of color) got summarily killed off. I'd add that this is partly because Syril is a better written character—but, then, white men have long been better written characters. That is evidence of her point.

But I'm frustrated by recent fandom's/leftwing YouTube's discourse on "redemption." I love a good redemption story; it's my favorite kind, but I think we need to dig deeper into the concept because, too often, it gets used without being explored.

"Redemption" is (at least primarily) a Christian concept. Traditionally, it refers to being saved from damnation, and this entails is a mix of personal responsibility and external acceptance. It requires personal responsibility in the form of actions like repentance of sins, penance, baptism, truly reformed behavior, etc. It requires external acceptance because ultimately it's God's to accept or withhold, and in many versions of Christianity, it cannot fully be attained without God's grace, that is, without that mystical quality of salvation that one cannot earn but is given.

When we use in secular discussions, as of characters like Syril Karn or DS9's Garak, or real people (Jessie mentions JK Rowling), we often end up with formulations like video commenter elanthys makes: "But not everyone deserves redemption, and not everyone who does gets it...." What does this actually mean? "Deserves" according to whom? "Gets" from whom? In the theological context, the answer is God. God can grant grace to someone who doesn't "deserve" it. (In traditional Calvinism, no one deserves it.) All redeemed people ultimately "get" it from God.

So who grants redemption in secular society? I think, by default, it usually translates to "us," the people having the conversation, the good people, the good leftists, the anti-fascists, etc. "We" judge that some do not deserve redemption. "We," sometimes in error, withhold it from those who may. What does it mean to be redeemed? In Christianity, it means heading to heaven. In the secular context, it means being socially forgiven, I guess? No longer cancelled, etc.? Slate wiped clean?

I do not trust myself to determine who metaphysically "deserves" anything. There are people I have not forgiven, but that says more about me than them. I do believe in accountability, which is, in essence, what Jessie is calling for. Accountability is a comparatively easy concept, if hard to achieve. If you've done harm, own it and take proportionally appropriate steps to repair it or—if it can't be repaired—do other, ideally related work to bring more good into the world.

Syril is never accountable for his actions. If he hadn't died and was to have a "redemption" arc, I think he would have had to spend the rest of his life trying to repair the damage or, more accurately, change the system so similar damage does not continue. But did he "deserve redemption"? I don't like the God-like insight that question presupposes.

Personally, I'm a Buddhist, and I prefer a Buddhist framework: that we are all on the path to awakening. We're just in different places, going at different rates, and taking different "side trails" to get there. The question of what we "deserve" is fairly meaningless. We are where we are; we carry the karma that we carry and work through it as best we can. And we can, to an extent, recognize that in each other and help each other through it.

I was watching a YouTube video essay on girls being acculturated to the male gaze and learning to perform for it from a very young age—and it hit me like a ton of bricks: I didn’t experience this. I don’t think I had any awareness of a male gaze until well into my young adulthood (maybe 25-30), when I did become aware of occasionally being catcalled or—on the nicer end—being praised by a passing guy for looking nice today.

But from my earliest memories all the way through puberty, all of high school, and well into college, I never had a sense of males “gazing” at me or a sense that I should perform for their benefit.

I wanted to be a pretty girl. I had a sense of what that meant aesthetically and enjoyed dress-up. But my sense from childhood through high school was mediated almost exclusively by my social feelings about other girls. I wanted to be as good as they were (or better, let’s be honest). I wanted to be acceptable to them—not sexually, but socially. I didn’t want to look sexy; I wanted to look cool, not necessarily chasing-the-latest-trend cool (though I pegged my jeans like everyone else) but what I considered to be looking good in my own body.

Much this, though, happened as solitary dress-up “play,” even into adulthood. In public, I mostly wanted to look nice but not attract attention. And I wanted to be comfortable, so I wore pants and T-shirts as much as I was allowed and mostly based “looking nice” on whether I felt things fit well. This dressing down may have been a large part of why the “male gaze” never imposed itself on me: and the glasses and being a skinny bean. But I wasn’t “ugly,” and teen boys being teen boys, I expect some of them “gazed” at me (and probably everything else female), but I was literally never aware of it. I was so unaware of it that by the time I graduated high school, I was painfully convinced that no guy would ever find me attractive or ask me out. But my solution to this was not to dress sexy; it was to “stop being so shy” and start asking out the guys I liked. (Yeah, that didn’t work.)

Thinking about this now—how totally oblivious to the ubiquitous “gaze” I was—I wonder if this is a sign that I have always been a friendship bonder (and maybe asexual-adjacent), that bonding through sexuality just never occurred to me. The idea that a guy would find me sexy on a purely physical level always has felt uncomfortable and, frankly, insulting to my personhood. And while I definitely had a physical taste in guys, I couldn’t imagine ever crushing on them without admiring them personally, mainly for what I perceived as their moral values and intellect. Meanwhile, at the end of the day, my central relationships, the ones that mattered and sustained and were real and badly scarred me, were always friendships, with girls, guys; it didn’t matter.

I wonder how genuinely uncommon my experience is, or is it just one that doesn’t get talked about?

(Note: written a couple months ago, but not posted till now.) I got myself embroiled in an online chat-based dispute about how to address certain racist stereotypes that were voiced in a community I’m part of. This has sparked a lot of self-reflection on how I approached it, and I wanted to share some of that here.

I’m going to skip specifics, but in short, a racist stereotype voiced by a person from the Global North was called out by a person from the Global South, who also asked for a larger organization-level response. That response—at least the first stage of it—came in the form of an email denouncing racist remarks with clear (though not explicit) reference to this incident.

I voiced the thought that singling out that one person in the email was not the best approach. This ignited further discourse, which I would sum up as critiquing me for centering the feelings of a person from the Global North over the needs, feelings, etc. of the people suffering harm in the Global South. In the course of this critique, I was asked why I was centering the feelings of the privileged, and over the past day or so, I’ve thought about that a lot.

There is not just one answer.

Part of the answer is that, as a person from the Global North, I am more empathetic to that positionality because it is closer to my own experiences, and so I default to showing more empathy for that positionality. That is not a good reason, and—with no good excuse—I did seriously misread the social situation of that chat, in that I did not properly take into account the compounded harm to my comrades from the Global South. From that perspective, anything that further decentered their already marginalized voices intensified the harm to them, and I should have seen that and responded differently.( Read more... )

Good video on "neuroliberalism," the psychological dimension of neoliberalism. (This is a real but rarely used word, which I'm trying to popularize. The video doesn't use it, but that's essentially what it's about.)

I really enjoyed Quality Culture's video on the movie, Atonement. Disclaimer: I have not seen the movie or read the book, so my thoughts purely based on this video.



I really appreciated the narrative the video highlights of moving from a univocal perspective to a dialogic perspective as a way of presenting human beings with sympathy and without judgment. I also understand there's ambiguity and irony in this, since the dialogism is entirely authored by one (problematized) voice. But I also appreciate ambiguity and irony, and overall, the story this video explores expresses why a dialogic approach to storytelling--and life, really--is so central to me.

I've been considering posting an open letter to the person who cut me off in 2014. I'll write more about that in the future, but for now, I sent a draft to my mother for her input, and I thought I'd share part of her response with some of my own thoughts.

My mom wrote:

You don’t need to seek anyone else’s input about this gesture towards communication (including mine). As you noted yourself, all your thinking and feeling is your own responsibility.

Looking at my own miscalculations over the years, I think I really do need to seek input. That's part of my being responsible.

I have suspected that [the person who cut you off] acted on poor advice from someone else when she rejected all communication with you.

I suspect this too.

But no one knows the “directing mind,” as Marcus [Aurelius]’s translator calls it, the way that one knows their own. (I have made my own misjudgements about my decisions, which reminds me that one can feel embarrassed or inadequate without feeling guilty.)

This last line I find absolutely fascinating. It makes me reflect that I very rarely feel embarrassed without feeling guilty. (I more often feel inadequate without feeling guilty.) But embarrassment and guilt are closely linked for me. For example, last term I felt embarrassed by some of my clumsy white teacher moves that failed to help one student trying to discuss racial justice; I also felt (mildly) guilty for it--only mildly because I knew I was really doing my 100% best, but still, well, chagrined. I will have to think more about this link and what it means in my life.

I love my mom!

I'll be teaching a workshop on fictional languages in worldbuilding for the Willamette Writers Hybrid Conference this August. Registration is now open and folks can learn more at Bit.ly/Wilwrite24. I've been there quite a few times now, as speaker and attendee, and it's good fun, good food, and lots of writing craft and publishing info.