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.

content warning for non-graphic ethics discussion of Really Bad Things.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while and figure I’ll put some thoughts down. People seem to use two main ethical approaches to orienting themselves to those who do really bad things. I mean things like might include rape, murder, all the way to war crimes. The philosophical crux seems to be whether such people are theoretically redeemable (in a secular and/or possibly religious sense).

One view holds that some actions are “beyond redemption,” at least in a worldly/social sense. In this view, if you commit certain really bad actions, you are irredeemable for life (if not beyond), and people should treat you as such. YouTuber Steve Shives is in this camp, as he explains well in his interesting video on Garak in Deep Space Nine. He likes Garak as a character, but notes that if this were real life, Garak would not be morally redeemable because, regardless of his personal moral development, he has committed acts too heinous. For reference, Shives notes that the Cardassians in DS9, including Garak, are coded as Nazis. Basically, he’s saying Nazis—and, by extension, others who do really bad things—can’t be redeemed, i.e. it would be immoral to consider them/treat them as redeemable. It would be giving a pass to their heinousness.



[EDIT: reworking this paragraph in response to selenak's very legitimate point that I totally mischaracterized Christianity.] This view—though atheist Shives might cringe at this—seems philosophically close to Christianity, in the sense that it posits some people deserve to go to hell. Selenak rightly reminds me that Christianity is based on the idea that everyone can repent and be forgiven anything; in that sense, no one is beyond redemption, which sounds like the opposite of the view Shives is expressing. Solid point. I was thinking (a) of the Calvinist strain that infests American secular thinking, which holds that everyone deserves damnation, but more broadly (b) of the metaphor of existence after damnation: the person who didn't repent and, therefore, is now stuck in hell for eternity, regardless of what potential they might theoretically have for learning better/repenting given longer life/reincarnation/purgatory. An attitude of "you can't be redeemed" is what I think of as "secular damnation" in that, metaphorically, it treats the person as if they were damned in the eyes of the human judge, maybe not for eternity but for their life on Earth. I do think that view is related to certain Christian mindsets (and not just Christian), though it's fair to note that Christianity is also founded on the idea of radical redemption for all through Christ. It's complicated.

The other view holds that people are constantly in flux (at least potentially) and that anyone could theoretically be redeemed if they change enough to become a truly better person. In this view, people should be treated more according to who they are in the present (which could include actions to atone for the past). Under this view, Garak is certainly potentially redeemable. It’s a question of how much he changes, including what he might do to try to be accountable for former heinous acts. And I’d like to amplify a point made in some of the comments on Shives’ video: redemption is not the same as forgiveness. Both words have many meanings, but I’m with those commenters who see redemption as more internal to the self while forgiveness is something someone gives you (though you can give it to yourself too).( Read more... )

I'm blown away by this beautiful cover for WriteHive's upcoming Reclaiming Joy anthology, which I'm proud to be featured in.

Yep, I’m going to gripe about Strange New Worlds S2, ep. 5 (the Spock one), so if that’s going to kill your buzz, please feel free to skip.

The (Mostly) Good
To begin with (virtually spoiler free), this episode had a couple of very good things:

1) Amanda. New Trek Amanda has been written very well in general, and this may be the best Amanda episode in all Star Trek. I love how she is now being treated like full, complex person.

2) The aliens. Though they loosely fall under the “super-evolved energy being” trope, they are different from every other ST alien I can recall, and that’s a quite a trick after almost 60 years of media. They’re benevolent but also narrowminded and just culturally different in their communication patterns. Well done.

I have only one complaint, which is the universalization of the “friendship doesn’t matter” trope. Alien as these beings are, they 100% agree with us (21st century US, for ex.) and our heroes (23rd century) that friendship doesn’t matter much, thereby presenting this not as a cultural quirk but a universal law. As a friendship bonder, this sets my teeth on edge exactly as I imagine the “bury your queers” trope does queer people’s: (not exact quote) “We’re friends, but I want something...” (wait for it) “...more.” Okay, I’ll stop now.

3) Bonus good: Pike. He was a minor character in this, but he came through for Spock as a supportive friend and it spoke well of his character.

4) Bonus good: Excellent acting throughout. This includes Chapel, who is bringing her A game.

5) Bonus good: A lot of the jokes, in and of themselves, were funny.
Spoilers and griping follow.( Read more... )