People Who Have Expressed What I Think Most Articulately So That I Don't Have To

[alixtii]

Suzie at Echidne of the Snakes, on how Dollhouse is and isn't (and should and shouldn't be) feminist, here. (I think we may disagree on whether or not sex work is inherently anti-feminist--I don't think it is--but that obscures the more important point that, both in real life and on the show, the way sex work is actually conducted is pretty clearly immoral in almost all cases.)

cesare, on using sexually explicit RPF and FPF, particularly those involving some type of queerness, as a mechanism of critique and attack and mockery, here and here. And for the record, no, I would have no problem with people writing RPF about me even if the purpose was to slander me, and even if they leave it in places I'll probably see it. The fact that they wanted to attack me would sadden me, of course, if I found out about it, but the particular method they chose would be one I'd consider legitimate and valid and even sort of awesome; all the world's a text and we should feel free to remix it.

The first rule of RPF is, of course, that the characters we never write are never the real people (if your metaphysics allows for such a thing) they purport to be; in this context, the very idea of RPF as an attack is logically incoherent. Which is not to say that doing anything at all with the intent to hurt somebody (or the knowledge that it would hurt them) is an okay thing, or that the mere knowledge that someone else acted with that intent couldn't itself be hurtful, but that's a very different critique, and I've seen people specifically claiming that intent isn't relevant to the discussion they were trying to have.

yhlee, on "how to avoid the wind-up toy effect," dealing with issues of worldbuilding especially in science fiction and fantasy settings, here. At some point I'm going to write why I think what she writes there is a useful corrective to what I found problematic or wrong coming out of the Science and Magic panel at writercon, but for now I'll settle on just linking it.

Comments

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

No, easy answers are not to be had. I'd probably answer "no" to your two questions, but obviously there's some point (violence?) where the answer becomes "yes."

[http://users.livejournal.com/peasant_/]

I worked out what was worrying me about this (beyond the obvious 'you should be nice to people').

If you believe that we live in a structurally sexist, racist and homophobic society such that anybody at any time may be sexist, racist and homophobic unintentionally, then how are you defining 'sexists and homophobes' such that you recognise them to be sure it is ethically acceptable to yourself not to treat them with dignity and respect?

Even if you are only treating them without dignity and respect in the moments of their (possibly unintentional) acts of sexism, racism or homophobia, how do you define the boundaries of those moments and those actions so that your withdrawal of dignity and respect does not spill over into their general lives?

In short, this sounds awfully like you are temporarily using the definition of racists, sexists and homophobes which is in fact current in wider society - namely defined by intent. And then of course you tap into a whole new raft of questions about how you identify accurately somebody else's intent.

So why your 'probably no'?

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking about this too. Hopefully I'll elaborate further when I have some more time, but I think the issue has as much to do with the definitions of "dignity" and "respect" as with sexist/racist/homophobe. Which is to say there are such things as attacks on one's fundamental humanity, but there too are attacks on a sort of lower-level dignity, a disrespect of the person but not her personhood: the question becomes more a question of courtesy than of morality, if that makes sense. Being ethical without giving in to the Cult of Nice.

Certainly anything which assumed an essentialist conception of what a racist, etc. would be would be problematic. I was responding to something someone else said, so I find it easy to believe that if I were phrasing the question while choosing my words carefully, I might be more specific as to which types of violations would count or not.

More later, maybe.