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Liberal White Angst
Aug. 13th, 2007 06:45 pmNow that IBARW has come to an end:
1. While breaking my Buffy character index into two parts, I added Caridad and Shannon to it. Adding one (more; there are CoC's already on the list) character of color to the index isn't a meaningful gesture in any way, especially considering the extreme periphereality of Caridad's roles in the stories in which she appears, but I'm glad I got to make at least a symbolic one. And I look forward to writing fic which includeds Caridad, Chao-Ahn, and/or other Slayers of color in more central roles--as well as finally taking on the question of Kennedy's nationality.
2. Rona is one of the few characters I actually dislike. I think most of the reasons are more classist than anything else, but I'm not so naive as to think there's not some subtle racism at work. I wish I could do something about it--but she consistently inspires in me the desire to spork my eyes out than seems similar to how some other people feel about Kennedy. (Kennedy was assertive because she knew what she was doing, having been trained since she was six; Rona was just clueless and whined a lot.)
3. Come the feminist utopia I'll be able to hate a character without worrying about the color of her skin. That said, I'll be a post-feminist in the post-patriarchy, and anyone who says "Maybe you just do hate her without it having anything to do with the color of her skin (or the cultural phenomenon which supervene)" automatically fails. Anyone who says that after saying "I don't think people can compartmentalize that way" during the incest discussions (I'm thinking of the older, pre-strikethrough discussions, mostly) really fails.
4. My use of "feminist utopia" in #3 to describe without racism betrays some of my ideological assumptions in the way I approach intersectionality. I still implicitly sort of treat other forms of injustice as symptoms of sexism/heterosexism, privileging gender issues over race issues, despite having received the memo that (so-called "third wave," and yes the term is problematic and erases portions of our history) feminists aren't supposed to do that anymore, but rather treat various forms of injustice as coequal (although presumably not all exactly as equal as each other?). I believe in interrelated systems of injustice and I call it patriarchy. The term I use for the response to and resistance against that system "feminism." I recognize the ways this usage is problematic, but my best alternatives--"injustice" and "justice"--are not, despite having a nice Augustinian flavor, as transparent to the ideological assumptions at work behind them.
5. Despite having performed a rather massive rotation of my user icons--all icons except for my Mesektet have been rotated out and replaced with a comics icon--still none of my six icon slots include a character of color. Now changing that would be a pretty easy fix--find a Martha or Tish icon (or, if I want to keep the comics theme I just adopted, a Dust one) somewhere and rotate it in--but that would of course be treating the symptom rather than the disease. (That's a bit too flip, I think; "patriarchy" is a self-perpetuating system. But I can't think of any tangible way that having a Tish Jones icon instead of a Kitty Pryde one will fight racism/patriarchy.)
6. That said, the way I find Tish Jones really hot really makes me feel better about the way I react to standards of beauty in regards to fictional characters (my standards wrt meatspace people tends to be less dependent on objective physical appearance). My standards will always have a racist component--there are few things I find more attractive than unblemished, creamy white skin (why do people get tans again?)--but I do seem to be responding to non-white characters in ways that I haven't noticed myself doing in the past. Perhaps the most important thing was just getting out of the Whedonverse--a large number of the texts (shows, movies, comic books) than I'm currently consuming have some pretty kick-ass characters of color, played by very attractive women. (And once I've gathered a few more data points, it's okay that Gina Torres doesn't do it for me, because there a different pattern elsewhere.)
7. If I get the feeling that I'm unintentionally playing anti-racism bingo in this post, it's probably because I am. So it goes. (Only thing to do is to keep on trying to do better.)
1. While breaking my Buffy character index into two parts, I added Caridad and Shannon to it. Adding one (more; there are CoC's already on the list) character of color to the index isn't a meaningful gesture in any way, especially considering the extreme periphereality of Caridad's roles in the stories in which she appears, but I'm glad I got to make at least a symbolic one. And I look forward to writing fic which includeds Caridad, Chao-Ahn, and/or other Slayers of color in more central roles--as well as finally taking on the question of Kennedy's nationality.
2. Rona is one of the few characters I actually dislike. I think most of the reasons are more classist than anything else, but I'm not so naive as to think there's not some subtle racism at work. I wish I could do something about it--but she consistently inspires in me the desire to spork my eyes out than seems similar to how some other people feel about Kennedy. (Kennedy was assertive because she knew what she was doing, having been trained since she was six; Rona was just clueless and whined a lot.)
3. Come the feminist utopia I'll be able to hate a character without worrying about the color of her skin. That said, I'll be a post-feminist in the post-patriarchy, and anyone who says "Maybe you just do hate her without it having anything to do with the color of her skin (or the cultural phenomenon which supervene)" automatically fails. Anyone who says that after saying "I don't think people can compartmentalize that way" during the incest discussions (I'm thinking of the older, pre-strikethrough discussions, mostly) really fails.
4. My use of "feminist utopia" in #3 to describe without racism betrays some of my ideological assumptions in the way I approach intersectionality. I still implicitly sort of treat other forms of injustice as symptoms of sexism/heterosexism, privileging gender issues over race issues, despite having received the memo that (so-called "third wave," and yes the term is problematic and erases portions of our history) feminists aren't supposed to do that anymore, but rather treat various forms of injustice as coequal (although presumably not all exactly as equal as each other?). I believe in interrelated systems of injustice and I call it patriarchy. The term I use for the response to and resistance against that system "feminism." I recognize the ways this usage is problematic, but my best alternatives--"injustice" and "justice"--are not, despite having a nice Augustinian flavor, as transparent to the ideological assumptions at work behind them.
5. Despite having performed a rather massive rotation of my user icons--all icons except for my Mesektet have been rotated out and replaced with a comics icon--still none of my six icon slots include a character of color. Now changing that would be a pretty easy fix--find a Martha or Tish icon (or, if I want to keep the comics theme I just adopted, a Dust one) somewhere and rotate it in--but that would of course be treating the symptom rather than the disease. (That's a bit too flip, I think; "patriarchy" is a self-perpetuating system. But I can't think of any tangible way that having a Tish Jones icon instead of a Kitty Pryde one will fight racism/patriarchy.)
6. That said, the way I find Tish Jones really hot really makes me feel better about the way I react to standards of beauty in regards to fictional characters (my standards wrt meatspace people tends to be less dependent on objective physical appearance). My standards will always have a racist component--there are few things I find more attractive than unblemished, creamy white skin (why do people get tans again?)--but I do seem to be responding to non-white characters in ways that I haven't noticed myself doing in the past. Perhaps the most important thing was just getting out of the Whedonverse--a large number of the texts (shows, movies, comic books) than I'm currently consuming have some pretty kick-ass characters of color, played by very attractive women. (And once I've gathered a few more data points, it's okay that Gina Torres doesn't do it for me, because there a different pattern elsewhere.)
7. If I get the feeling that I'm unintentionally playing anti-racism bingo in this post, it's probably because I am. So it goes. (Only thing to do is to keep on trying to do better.)