More Thoughts
Feb. 9th, 2007 04:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alixtii"femlash" : "slash" :: "microwave oven" : "oven"
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Some people are having "the authorial responsibility discussion." Some people are having it intelligently, some foolishly, some civilized, some wankfully--such is the way of the world.
Long-time readers will remember me struggling with these very questions myself when I asked "Do texts speak with a moral voice?"
But the question can't be--or at least shouldn't be--about what is inherently objectionable. The issue is context. Who is reading? Who is being harmed? The last question requires a healthy dose of both theory--to understand how thoughts can lead to words can lead to deeds--and empiricism, to see how they are actually doing it. The same text in different contexts can serve radically different--often diametrically opposite--functions. Nineteen Eighty-Four, a novel by socialist Eric Blair, has been reappropriated by the neo-conservatives. Hell, the New Testament has been basically reappropriated by evangelicals and conservatives. WTF?
It's not what is being written, in and of itself, which is at issue; it's what is being written in the context of how, and by whom, it is being read. (And who's writing, both individually and as a community.) What may be perfectly fine in the feminist utopia may be problematic in the here-now, and vice versa.
What other texts--and by texts I include practices, customs, behaviors--does the text in question connect with or resist? Sexual deviants, good and bad, do not have a broad network of structures already in place in our culture to facilitate their predation; sexists, racists, and heterosexists do. (Where rapists fall could be arguable--but again, noncon in a mainstream comic book is not going to have the same sociological effect as in a fanfic. It's just not. The values of the interpretative community are different, the readers are different, it just has a completely different function, and any quick and easy comparison between the two is absurd.) A story about incest is not going to function in the same way as a story about racism.
(Which is not to say that I don't come down firmly on the side of laissez-faire when writing what we want, when representing our fantasies. We have to work out our issues within the iconography which we have at hand, at that means at times writing things which may be sexist, racist, or heterosexist. But writing what we want is not the same as refusing to be critical of them after we've written them--the response to problematic speech is never supression, and always more speech.)
If you don't believe that patriarchal structures and systemic sexism (racism, heterosexism, etc.) are embedded in our society, then I'm sure that we feminists come off looking like self-righteous, wanton hypocrites, wanting a ridiculous double standard.
But then you come off looking willfully blind, so I suppose we're even.
*
Some people are having "the authorial responsibility discussion." Some people are having it intelligently, some foolishly, some civilized, some wankfully--such is the way of the world.
Long-time readers will remember me struggling with these very questions myself when I asked "Do texts speak with a moral voice?"
But the question can't be--or at least shouldn't be--about what is inherently objectionable. The issue is context. Who is reading? Who is being harmed? The last question requires a healthy dose of both theory--to understand how thoughts can lead to words can lead to deeds--and empiricism, to see how they are actually doing it. The same text in different contexts can serve radically different--often diametrically opposite--functions. Nineteen Eighty-Four, a novel by socialist Eric Blair, has been reappropriated by the neo-conservatives. Hell, the New Testament has been basically reappropriated by evangelicals and conservatives. WTF?
It's not what is being written, in and of itself, which is at issue; it's what is being written in the context of how, and by whom, it is being read. (And who's writing, both individually and as a community.) What may be perfectly fine in the feminist utopia may be problematic in the here-now, and vice versa.
What other texts--and by texts I include practices, customs, behaviors--does the text in question connect with or resist? Sexual deviants, good and bad, do not have a broad network of structures already in place in our culture to facilitate their predation; sexists, racists, and heterosexists do. (Where rapists fall could be arguable--but again, noncon in a mainstream comic book is not going to have the same sociological effect as in a fanfic. It's just not. The values of the interpretative community are different, the readers are different, it just has a completely different function, and any quick and easy comparison between the two is absurd.) A story about incest is not going to function in the same way as a story about racism.
(Which is not to say that I don't come down firmly on the side of laissez-faire when writing what we want, when representing our fantasies. We have to work out our issues within the iconography which we have at hand, at that means at times writing things which may be sexist, racist, or heterosexist. But writing what we want is not the same as refusing to be critical of them after we've written them--the response to problematic speech is never supression, and always more speech.)
If you don't believe that patriarchal structures and systemic sexism (racism, heterosexism, etc.) are embedded in our society, then I'm sure that we feminists come off looking like self-righteous, wanton hypocrites, wanting a ridiculous double standard.
But then you come off looking willfully blind, so I suppose we're even.