Jim C. Hines's Blog, page 111

Evil Albino Trope is Evil – Nalini Haynes

Welcome back. I’m doubly grateful to Nalini Haynes for this essay, both for writing it, and because it’s a facet of discrimination and stereotyping that I haven’t thought as much about. Thank you, Nalini, for helping to remedy that.

Come back tomorrow for a post by Joie Young.

When I was in primary school, my classmates explained that I was evil because ‘all albinos are evil, look at albinos on TV and in the movies.’ I’ve been looking ever since.

Star Trek Deep Space Nine featured an albino Klingon who murdered defenceless wives and children.

The Da Vinci Code’s villain was an evil, masochistic albino. Every time he self-mutilated, I cringed and died a bit inside.

The pilot of Defiance had two albino-type alien villains, significantly paler than everyone else. Their son was Romeo to another character’s Juliet; ‘Romeo’ had a large tuft of blue hair to differentiate him from his evil albino-type parents.

The Heat’s albino was painted as the villain but [spoiler alert] he was ‘only’ a misogynistic bastard whose unprofessional conduct should have resulted in inter-departmental complaints.

The Hobbit: the Desecration Desolation of Hollywood Smaug features an albino orc. Orcs are so evil that, to make one orc stand out as being super-evil, Peter Jackson made him an albino. I loved the original book; IF ONLY PJ STUCK TO THE STORY.

The Silence of Medair received an honourable mention from the Aurealis Awards judges for its ‘playful’ dealing with racial tropes. I suffered its atrocious prose to discover the judges’ idea of playful dealing with racial tropes was making the villains a race of albino-types.

The evil albino trope is so prevalent that authors trying to be clever create evil (generically bad and/or inappropriately-behaving) albinos who are not the ultimate villain to mislead the audience as in The Heat (movie) and Wolves by Simon Ings. The evil albino trope affects popular perception of and treatment of real-life albinos.

Erin Carpenter said, “A minister’s son told our daughter she was the devil because she had red eyes and that she was going to go to hell.” Because evil albino is the devil.

In 2001 I overheard a conversation between the parents of an albino in grade three and the teacher. The teacher said the albino spent her class breaks in tears hiding in the bushes because her classmates were bullying her. The teacher said the albino had to take responsibility for being bullied, had to stop crying and hiding from the bullies. Because evil albino is always at fault.

In 2005 I landed a job at CNAHS, part of the Department of Health in South Australia. I was refused disability access repeatedly, including in email and in a staff meeting where I was publicly humiliated before walking out in tears. Because evil albino should be refused disability access.

A CNAHS colleague commented she couldn’t read the smallest print on a notice without her glasses. I replied that I couldn’t read anything beyond the largest print on that notice with my glasses. The senior social worker said, “That’s because you’re too vain to wear coke bottle glasses.” The senior social worker repeatedly asked me not to apply for work elsewhere because she needed me, requiring me to work the longest hours and take on the most difficult clients (clients she should have accepted). Then she participated in a selection committee that gave my job to a student she hadn’t allowed to counsel clients only three months earlier. After I lodged a complaint about managers refusing disability access and then replacing me, the senior social worker refused to be a referee, thus ensuring I could never work as a counsellor again. Because evil albino is vain.

CNAHS’s investigator initially committed to natural justice but later refused to include my evidence. After redacting others’ interviews, the investigator falsely claimed I did not have a disability, I had not asked for disability access and I did not need disability access. Because evil albino deserves neither justice nor a job.

The Equal Opportunities Commission investigated. The EOC found that CNAHS refused disability access repeatedly but that this was my fault because I hadn’t asked “enough times.” Because evil albino is always at fault.

I took the matter to court, representing myself (unemployed, remember?). The judge ruled crucial evidence inadmissible; this ‘inadmissible’ evidence included manager’s notes, employment forms and emails proving declaration of disability and refusals of access. When I asked why he was ruling my evidence inadmissible he laughed and said, “Because I can.” Because evil albino should not have evidence.

After losing my career I turned to further study. In 2007 the Human Rights Commission found the University of South Australia discriminated against me. The Human Rights representative presented an offer on behalf of UniSA: $4000 compensation, a gagging order and a permanent ban from further education. Because evil albino is not entitled to an education nor a job.

Once I was allowed to return to study (after threatening to expose UniSA on radio), they harassed and victimised me, forcing me to withdraw. In 2008 UniSA’s lawyer offered me over $3000 compensation with a gagging order and a permanent ban on further education. In the next few years I repeatedly applied to universities to retrain but was continually knocked back until 2012 when RMIT wanted to make me an offer but could not do so because UniSA refused to confirm my previous education. Because evil albino should not be allowed an education.

(I wrote to UniSA threatening legal action then the difficulty was magically resolved although they denied responsibility. I’m now enrolled at RMIT, earning distinctions and high distinctions.)

The evil albino trope is lazy writing, creating a sense of ‘other’ by victimising a small minority group. The evil albino trope alienates albinos, punishing us for looking different and suffering bad eyesight. Reinforcing perceptions of incompetence and evil-ness in this people group is discrimination and victimisation.

Last year I spoke up against the evil albino trope in a cultural misappropriation panel at a convention. Afterwards several people told me that they weren’t misappropriating albinism, they were justified in writing their evil albino.

If you wouldn’t write an ‘evil [insert racial group, sexual orientation or disability group here]’ then do not write an evil albino.

References

Where it’s dangerous to live with Albinism
The biennial conference of the Albinism Fellowship of Australia
TV tropes: the Evil Albino trope
Wikipedia: albinism in popular culture

Nalini Haynes is a writer and also the editor of Dark Matter Zine. She can be found on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Pinterest, and Google Plus.

I Don’t See Color – Michi Trota

Welcome to the second week of guest blog posts about representation in SF/F. Today’s essay is from Michi Trota, whose photo (at the bottom) is SO MUCH COOLER than any of my author photos. Not that I’m jealous. Nope, not me. Sigh.

There’s a line in this piece that really stuck with me:

Skin color was nothing more than interchangeable window-dressing if we were “all the same underneath,” right?

It resonated with something an artist was talking about this past weekend at the “Diversity in Nerd Culture” panel at No Such Con, about how changing the race of a character like Perry White can be problematic if it changes nothing except skin color, treating race as something that has no effect on who someone is. It was a good panel, and I’m still processing a lot of what I learned.

In the meantime, thank you Michi for sharing her story and kicking off the second round of posts. And tomorrow, Nalini Haynes will be talking about the “evil albino” trope.

Almost all of the women in science fiction/fantasy fandoms that I have felt the strongest affinity for have been white. Partially it’s because there just aren’t many Asian (particularly Pacific Islander) women in supportive (much less leading) roles in the fandoms I grew up with. Most of the TV shows I loved watching as a child had a terminal case of Smurfette Syndrome in which the single girl on the team was white (Voltron, Battle of the Planets, Silverhawks, Starvengers, Starblazers, I’m looking right at you). And when there were characters who were Asian women, they almost universally conformed to some variation of Asian stereotype: the awkward (science/tech) nerd, the ingénue pop star, the Dragon Lady, the grades-obsessed student, and almost always without a love interest (or at least one who reciprocated their feelings).

No one wants to see themselves as a walking cardboard cut-out, but that’s not really the problem with seeing characters who look like you being played as stereotypes. It’s not that I didn’t find anything of myself to relate to in those stereotypes – yes, I played the piano, I was a hyper-competitive honors student, and I even studied kendo for a few years – it’s that many of them felt painfully familiar. Seeing those moments reduced to caricatured facets and bad punchlines that all but screamed “Look how DIFFERENT and EXOTIC these characters are!” made me want to run in the other direction. When you’re the only Asian kid in your neighborhood and get weird looks for bringing chicharrón with spicy vinegar and garlic pork-filled siopao to the annual block party, you really don’t need any more reminders that you’re not like everyone else.

So when I discovered comics, I ignored spunky teenaged, fireworks-spouting Jubliee because I wanted to be like the poised and telepathic/telekinetic (and occasionally cosmically powerful) Jean Grey or the sarcastic, ass-kicking Domino instead. I played Sonya in Mortal Kombat instead of Chun-Li in Streetfighter. Robotech was probably the defining fandom of my childhood, and it had lots women in positions of authority, many of them tough, intelligent, independent and just as likely to do the rescuing as be rescued. But I hated the single Asian girl, the pop star Lynn Minmei. Even though she was one of the most influential characters of the series, I found her shallow, self-absorbed and selfish. It was her romantic rival, the no-nonsense Lisa Hayes, who I empathized with. She was brave, responsible and resourceful, and in the end, she got the guy.

At the time, I didn’t see anything odd about this. I grew up being told that not “seeing color” was the best way to avoid racism. Regardless of the color of their skin, people were not different “inside,” and treating everyone as if they were the same meant that you were not racist. So if everyone was “the same,” there was no reason I shouldn’t want to be more like Lisa than Minmei, or see myself more in Jean Grey than Jubilee. After all, Psylocke was still the same person after her mind was switched from her British white woman’s body to that of the Asian assassin, Kwannon. The writers wanted Psylocke to not “look like everyone else,” so why not makeover the white girl into an Asian? Skin color was nothing more than interchangeable window-dressing if we were “all the same underneath,” right?

But if people didn’t really “see” color, why was I the only one getting asked about martial arts and told I spoke English very well? Why did I always have to play Sulu during make-believe Star Trek at recess? If people still treated me differently, maybe it was because I wasn’t acting enough like everyone else or trying hard enough not to see skin color, especially my own.

There’s a passage from David Byunghyun Lee’s powerful essay about growing up Asian in America that encapsulates what I’ve struggled for most of my adult life to articulate about my relationship with racial identity:

“[W]hen [our parents] saw that their children could perform as white, they encouraged it without teaching us or telling us to love our Asian side. And as the line between performing as white and being white blurred, so did the line between thinking white people are better and thinking that being white is better. In hindsight, our biggest mistake was having believed in the line at all.”

Nowhere has the absence of that line become more apparent than in my own writing. Every piece of fiction I’ve ever written has been based around white characters. The short story I wrote about a family dealing with parental loss like mine? All white characters. The aborted fantasy tetralogy I spent years outlining and rewriting the first five chapters for? The main characters were all white, and the setting was another Tolkienesque pseudo-Western Europe. When I Mary Sue’d myself into my fan fiction, I wrote myself as a white girl. Apparently it never once occurred to me to write any Asian characters, much less as protagonists, even when they were supposed to be me.

In my personal essays, there is next to nothing about my experiences as an Asian American, outside the mentions of the Filipino food my mother made. I can easily write thousands of words about what it means to be a woman who loves geeky things and what it was like to be the only woman in my local comic book store every Wednesday. I can write about the shock of recognizing internalized sexism within myself and the embarrassment of realizing cotton candy pink blush is really not my color (simple bronzer, on the other hand…). I don’t have to force myself to acknowledge my relationship with gender.

Writing about my relationship with race, however, is a struggle.

When I write about being Asian, I instinctively move to the emotionally neutral realm of academia and sociological concepts. Writing about my relationship with race is like trying to talk with a distant relative who engenders no discernible feelings. Rebuilding that connection requires peeling away thirty-six years of scar tissue I never knew that I had, and while each layer reveals new depths of understanding, it also forces me to deal with the consequences of self-alienation.

What does it mean when I say that “I don’t see race?” It means that because I learned to see no difference between “white” and “color,” I have white-washed my own sense of self. It means that I know more about what it is to be a white person than what it is to be Asian, and I am a stranger among both. It means that I built my identity on a warped foundation but never noticed the asymmetry until I not only tried to create new worlds upon it, but began exploring my own as well. In the absence of acknowledging how being Asian is an inescapable part of who I am, I’ve become a cipher to myself.

Navigating the pitfalls and traps of gender stereotypes as a woman has been daunting, but I’ve never lost sight of my internal compass there. Exploring what it means to be an Asian woman, not just in distant terms of abstract social constructs, but in the language of my deepest self, means chasing my own personal white rabbit down the hole. And I have no idea what I’ll find on the other side.

Michi Trota is a writer, speaker, communications manager and community organizer in Chicago, IL. She writes about geek culture & fandom, fire performance and occasionally bacon on her blog, Geek Melange, and is a member of the Chicago Nerd Social Club’s Board of Organizers. In her spare time, she spins fire (sometimes in cosplay) with the fire+bellydance showcase, Raks Geek, and at the Chicago Full Moon Jams (for which she also manages communications and event planning). Her mutant power is making anyone hungry merely by talking about food. Which she does a lot.

[image error]

Photo by Braden Nesin.

Cool Stuff Friday

I’m off to New York this afternoon for No Such Convention. Have a good weekend, all!

Cats Taking Selfies.
Wet Cats. (Link from Michi Trota)
AT-ATs attack the Winter Olympics. (Link from Comrade Cat)
Book Sculptures by Malena Valcarcel. (Link from Kat Howard)
A can of Ravioli is devoured by lava. Just because.

Detcon1 Awards for YA and MG Speculative Fiction

Detcon1 is doing some very cool things, one of which is the creation of an award for YA and Middle Grade speculative fiction. Two awards will be given out, one in each category.

Anyone can nominate up to five titles for the awards. Only Detcon1 members (attending or supporting) will be able to vote on the final ballot, but you don’t have to be a member to help create that final ballot.

YA and MG works first published in 2013 are eligible. From the website, “Works published in a language other than English are also eligible if their first year of publication in English translation was 2013.”

The nomination deadline is coming up fast. All nominations must be received by 11:59 p.m. EST on February 28.

Details about the awards are on the Detcon1 Website. Or you can go directly to the Online Nomination Form. (You’ll need to create a PIN before you can nominate.)

Oh, and if you’re a Michigan-based 3-D artist interested in designing the award, please let them know on Facebook or at chair@detcon1.org!

Reading Roundup

I’ve fallen a bit behind in book reviews, so I’m going to do a quick threesome to get caught up.

#

Let’s start with Chuck Wendig‘s Under the Empyrean Sky [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy], a dystopian YA novel with genetically engineered super-corn. The stuff will grow pretty much anywhere and on anything … including people.

Cael is a young scavenger, sailing over the endless sea of corn, searching for anything they can sell to bring in a few extra bucks. Life in the Heartland pretty much bites the wax tadpole, but the Empyrean government in their floating cities are the blaster-wielding Goliath to the Heartland’s slingshot-carrying David, making it difficult for folks like Cael to do anything beyond grumble and survive the best they can.

This is book one of a trilogy, and there’s a lot of worldbuilding and groundwork being laid out. It’s fast-paced, gritty, and dark. (I did mention it was a dystopian story, right?) There are some very cool ideas here, from the corn that can infest and grow into people’s bodies to the different ways people attempt to rebel against their rulers.

A little grim for my personal taste, but a lot of creativity and plenty of action, and it ends with the promise of even more to come in book two.

#

Next up is the award-winning God’s War [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy], by Kameron Hurley. This one’s even grittier than Wendig. Here’s a quick summary from the Publishers Weekly review:

On a planet settled by Muslims and ravaged by constant war and pollution, Nyx, a former government-sponsored assassin or “bel dame,” gets by as a bounty hunter. Her assistant is the foreign magician Rhys, who can control the ubiquitous insects that drive the planet’s technology.

There’s a lot I really liked about this one, starting with the bugs. Hurley creates an entire world that runs on insect-based technology, from glowing bugs in lamps to carefully-bred beetles that can be used to deliver injections or draw blood to organic vehicles that run on bug-powered engines. The whole biological and genetic technologies are fascinating and engaging.

I also appreciate the central role of religion in the story, and the different perspectives we get from devout characters like Rhys and characters who appear to have turned their backs on God, like Nyx. That said, it bothers me that we have a planet colonized by Muslims that’s spent the past 3000 years fighting a religious war. I don’t know if this is something that will be addressed in the next books, if we get a broader view of the universe, but for now, this struck me as problematic.

The society Hurley creates has become dominated by women, in part as an effect of the neverending war. It was fascinating to see the reversals and changes.

Overall, not an easy book to read: it’s dark, different, at times troubling, and often thoughtful. Despite my reservations, I’m curious about the larger universe, and will probably be picking up the next one to see what happens.

#

Finally, there’s Stuart Moore’s Civil War [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy], the novelization of the Marvel Comics storyline of the same name. From the overview:

When a tragic battle blows a hole in the city of Stamford, killing hundreds of people, the U.S. government demands that all super heroes unmask and register their powers. To Tony Stark – Iron Man – it’s a regrettable but necessary step. To Captain America, it’s an unbearable assault on civil liberties…

I like the premise of the story a lot, the struggle between security and liberty, the danger of superpowered individuals and collateral damage. Unfortunately, the story didn’t really work for me. I certainly enjoyed watching Iron Man and Thor go toe-to-toe in The Avengers, but during that battle, you never really had the sense they would go so far as to kill one another.

That’s not the case in this book, which turns superheroes into deadly enemies … and that’s where I kept getting kicked out of the story. I couldn’t suspend my disbelief enough to accept that these characters would let themselves get so out of control. I get the urge to make them more human and flawed, I thought it went too far. While there are exceptions, I generally want my superhero stories to feature heroes I can actually like.

There were some good bits, and it was certainly a fast read, but it’s not one I’m likely to reread.

Gender in Genre – Katie

We wrap up part one of the guest blog posts with this story from Katie about the relative lack of good trans* characters.

My thanks to everyone who shared their thoughts and stories on the blog this week, and to all of the readers who responded so positively. My plan is to post the second half of the guest posts in the last week of February, with a round-up at the very end with links to everything that’s appeared here, along with some additional stories that I wasn’t able to include (because there were so many responses).

Have a wonderful weekend, all!

I find it almost laughable (I’m much too cynical to actually derive amusement from this) that for all we can accept with fiction, we cannot seem to accept diversity without at least a “…but…!” comment from someone. I’m not going to make a hyperbolic statement about how accepting dragons means accepting homosexual relationships – I think it’s a ridiculous, weak argument that makes no sense on any level – but instead just talk about how representation has let me, personally, down.

I identify publicly as trans*. I don’t know where on the spectrum I fit, but somewhere in the trans*/gender-queer area. I’m female identified, but I won’t go into the other details. Anyway. I find it so, so, so, so hard to find trans* characters I can identify with in books. Heck, I struggle to find trans* characters in books full stop.

I owe a lot to Mark Charan Newton, who allowed me to beta read some of his third Legends of the Red Sun novel, The Book of Transformations, which introduces a trans* character by the name of Lan. I won’t spoil the story, but we meet her whilst she’s presenting as a woman (but with the body of a male – she’s one of those lucky few who can pass with only a minimum of effort), but is singled out because she acts oddly within a group of female performers, none of whom know ‘what’ she is. Eventually she does get to transition (some cultists perform a possibly semi-magical genital reassignment surgery on her), and she spends the rest of that book (and the next) kicking ass.

I adore Lan. I do. And I wish I could kick ass like she does, or even just pass. Or be in a position where I could present. Anyway. Lan is a character I look up to and respect and love, but she’s almost alone in that respect, because I just can’t really find any trans* characters. Even if they are done well (such as by Guy Davis in his old Baker Street comics), it seems like victimisation is inevitable. Murder, assault, being outcast, etc. are all common situations applied to trans* characters (yes, even the beloved Neil Gaiman is no exception to this), and even if they survive the story it’s often not without some sort of violent conflict. In some other cases (e.g. Caitlín R. Kiernan’s The Drowning Girl), the trans* character comes with slurs, and they’re portrayed as being a little bit weird, and again, it just… doesn’t sit right with me. Victim or freak. Freak or victim. Why must it be – somewhat ironically – a binary choice?

On a similar note, I find the ‘Q’ and ‘A’ aspects of the QUILTBAG community to be almost untouched. Whilst authors like Malinda Lo might tackle the ‘Q’ with relation to sexuality in their books, and often with another person acting as a catalyst (e.g., girl thinks she’s straight – or doesn’t question that – until a certain hot girl walks past), I don’t feel it helps people like me. People who just question every aspect of themselves continuously. There’s no… instantaneous or strung-out-over-300-pages answers, there’s just questions, and its position as a valid identity seems overlooked, if not ignored. As for asexuality, rarely – if ever – have I see this, and genuinely it’s in the sense that it’s less the character is asexual and more the book is.

I don’t want to feel like all I can buy are specifically trans*-themed books, because… well, what I want is to see trans* people and gender-queer people and asexual people and questioning people in the same sort of books we’re now seeing gay, lesbian and bisexual people in. I don’t doubt that the trans* and gender-queer revolution will come, just as it has for many other minority groups, but of all the genres that has the potential for dealing with it in many ways – even providing optimism for true transitions, etc. – I find what’s on offer to be lacking.

I guess what I’m saying is I don’t feel like there’s much out there that represents me. Yeah, okay, I can find characters that represent aspects of me or facets of my being, but not something that comes close to the ‘whole’. I suppose that’s true for everyone to some degree, yet for me – and I guess people a bit like me – it’s as if we don’t exist, and if we do, it’s as if we’re there to be made into victims or just portrayed in manner which involves negativity.

Katie is a fan of genre fiction, gaming and animation, and she can be found on Twitter as @Loerwyn. She occasionally posts on her own blog, and that’s basically about it, really. She’s not particularly interesting.* But don’t worry, Jim didn’t write this. She did, so it’s okay.

*Editorial note: Jim would like to state for the record that he strongly disagrees with this statement!

Final Thoughts on Petitiongate

I haven’t been shy about sharing my opinion on a certain petition that’s been causing some internet uproar. At the same time, it’s a fact that some intelligent people, some of whom I respect, signed the thing. (As did some people I don’t respect, and don’t consider particularly intelligent, but that’s the way it goes with just about any group.)

A part of me really wants to be done with this conversation. But I also want to understand why these people would sign something that, to me, is such blatant over-the-top fear-mongering and dog-whistling, with bonus helpings of rewritten history. I’ve spent some time trying to find people’s reasoning in their own words. I’m quoting them not because I want to point fingers or attack anyone, but to try to understand, and to process my own responses to their statements.

If I’ve misrepresented anyone’s views with these quotes, please let me know so I can make the appropriate corrections.

This is a very long post about a topic that’s already been beaten to death and brought back in zombie form and strung up as the world’s most gruesome pinata, so I totally understand and respect anyone who chooses not to wade through another round. Have some emergency kittens instead.

Paul Levinson: [O]f course this is not literally a First Amendment issue, since there’s no Congressional or local state (unconstitutional via the 14th Amendment) censorship. But it is in effect a First Amendment issue, because it would result in censorship, and therefore is inconsistent with the spirit of the First Amendment, in the same way, as say, CBS’s censorship of language at the Grammys.

Fair enough. I’ve given people crap in the past about not understanding the First Amendment. I still think it’s counterproductive to bring it up in this kind of conversation, but I can accept that signers didn’t literally think SFWA was in danger of violating the U.S. Bill of Rights. The issue is censorship.

So the question becomes, can what was proposed in the job posting for Bulletin Editor properly be called censorship?

Levinson (cont): Editors, individually or in concert, indeed engage in decisions about what to publish and what not, what to solicit as content in articles, all the time. But that doesn’t smack of censorship, and the violation of the First Amendment in spirit … which a board expressly created and convened for the sole purpose of judging whether an article meets certain linguistic etc standards does. At least, does to me, which is why I signed the petition…

I strongly object to the creation of an advisory board whose sole purpose would be to determine if the editor’s choices pass some sort of linguistic or moral muster.

If I’m understanding correctly, Levinson’s fear is that a board will be convened solely to judge linguistic and moral standards. That would be troubling to me as well, if it happened.

The job description said the editor will, “Participate in [the] proofing and review process with select volunteer and board members.” It also stated that the editor should solicit cover art and articles that fit within SFWA’s standards and vision.

To me, it’s a huge leap from that posted description to the fear of a Morality Board of Censorship. I’m guessing some of those fears come from different perspectives on what happened last year that led to the suspension of the Bulletin. Some saw what happened as an editor and two respected writers being mobbed out of their jobs by a vocal minority over a pulp cover and using the phrase “lady editor” in a column. If you subscribe to that view, and if you assume that this review process would be a continuation of that “mob,” then I suppose this fear would make sense.

I don’t want to rehash last year’s battles. But as someone who was in that last issue writing about this stuff, I will say that a lot of the characterization of what happened last year has been grossly oversimplified and distorted. What happened was the result of a series of (in my opinion) poor choices by the editor, authors, and the then-President of SFWA. (I’ll note that I like some of these people and consider them friends, but I still think they dropped the ball here.)

Robert Silverberg: Many veteran members of SFWA objected to the early text and have worked it over to keep it to the point that pre-censorship of published material is an Orwellian injury to free speech, period.

…One would hope that readers of SFWA’s magazine would not take offense at anything they read in a publication that is intended to help them in the pursuit of their professional careers, but the appropriate way of objecting to such offensive material would be to write a letter of protest to the magazine, not to force the editor to be overruled in advance by a committee that determines what might be deemed offensive.

If I’m reading this right, the fear here is similar to Levinson’s, that the Bulletin’s content would be restricted based on standards of “offensiveness.” Again, this is not what the job description said, and I assume the fear comes from a continuation of last year.

It feels like there’s been some conflation of “professional” with “unoffensive.” For example, consider a random scantily clad heroine on a cover. Is that offensive? Maybe, maybe not. But is it professional?

That depends on where it’s being published. The pin-up sensibilities of one of Seanan McGuire’s recent book covers was totally appropriate for that book. The same kind of artwork as the cover for the professional publication of a writers’ organization? Almost certainly unprofessional and inappropriate for that publication.

I agree with Silverberg that this magazine should be helpful to us as writers in pursuit of our professional careers. As such, isn’t material that’s not relevant to our careers, and/or is actively damaging (by diminishing or belittling other professional writers) inappropriate for the magazine?

Silverberg also mentioned letters to the magazine, and I agree with him that letters to the Bulletin are a good way for us to yell at each other. I also think the standards of what we publish in a letters column are different than the standards we should be using for paid articles in the Bulletin. If someone wants to write a letter decrying the fact that Jim C. Hines is OMG THE WORST THING EVER TO HAPPEN TO SF/F, that’s one thing. But the moment the Bulletin is paying someone to chew me out…? That’s a whole different story.

David Gerrold: I signed the petition for the same reason I wanted to strangle the little old lady in the brown dress who used to write memos on what we could say and do in a Star Trek script because NBC had “standards.”

I believe that that an authors’ publication should cherish freedom of speech. I also believe that freedom of speech is also the responsibility to speak well and wisely. I believe that each of us is entitled to embarrass ourselves in public as well.

And in addition to the above, I believe that freedom of speech is not a freedom from consequences and everyone else also should also have the same freedom to respond.

…The issue is that the mechanism for making sure that the Bulletin is more “inclusive” is setting off alarm bells, because of the possibility that mechanism could someday be abused — used to restrict what’s published in the bulletin.

I believe that if we truly respect each other as authors and editors that we should respect the independence of the SFWA editor to actually edit the damn thing — and respect the independence of the people whose work is published in it as well.

Not having worked in television, I don’t know what Gerrold experienced at NBC, but if he’s had previous experiences of feeling censored as a writer, I can understand how he’d be sensitive to anything that looks like it could lead to the same situation. But again, this isn’t an area where I have first-hand experience.

But Gerrold makes the same assumption here that the mechanism being described is about making the Bulletin “inclusive.” While I think inclusiveness is a good goal, and one that SFWA and SF/F in general need to work a hell of a lot harder at, that’s not what was written in the job posting.

I agree with Gerrold on freedom and responsibility for speech, and that free speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences.

And yes, working with volunteers and Board members could theoretically evolve into a situation where a group was refusing to publish articles by This Group or That Group or whatever. As authors, we’re good at imagining “What if…” and taking it both to plausible and completely absurd conclusions.

The thing is, the setup we’ve had all along, with the President overseeing the Bulletin and the editor, could just as easily be taken along a hypothetical path of Good Intentions to those conclusions. So could an unsupervised editor, for that matter. I don’t see it as remotely likely, and more importantly, I don’t see anything in this job posting to explain why this fear has suddenly become such an urgent matter.

Gregory Benford quotes James L. Cambias: “I think it all comes down to “who decides?” Naturally, nobody wants the Bulletin to be gratuitously offensive to its readers — but what a number of people, myself included, are afraid of is that “offensiveness” will be used as a club to bash dissenting voices. This is not a purely theoretical concern, either. I would much rather have a single editor, who is personally responsible for the magazine’s content, than some nebulous, anonymous “advisory committee” enforcing their ideas of what is or isn’t offensive. At best it will result in a magazine that’s dull and unadventurous. At worst it will continue the ideological winnowing of SFWA.”

Again, I assume “not a purely theoretical concern” refers to last year’s mess. And okay, you’d prefer a single editor with power over a committee. For a lot of things, so would I. I’ve worked on committee-style writing in my day job, and it’s painful. Excruciating, at times.

But once again, there’s a chain of assumptions here to get from the posted job description to a “nebulous, anonymous ‘advisory committee’” controlling the Bulletin along ideological lines based on what is or isn’t offensive.

And nobody, as far as I can tell, bothered to ask. Nobody contacted the Board to find out what was meant by that bullet point stating that the editor will, “[p]articipate in proofing and review process with select volunteer and board members.”

ETA: It was pointed out, correctly, that Truesdale did email Steven Gould about that bullet point, asking who the “overseer(s)” would be and how they would determine “appropriate” content for the Bulletin. Gould responded:

There will be no “informal” group overseeing the editor’s selection. There may be an advisory board, but that is yet to be determined. Under the structure of SFWA (both old and new bylaws), the president is responsible for publications … We don’t have guidelines for “acceptable” articles, art, and ads other than content needs to serve the needs of the organization. Chief among those are our 5 core mission areas: to inform, support, promote, defend and advocate for professional writers … However, when content alienates portions of our membership it is =not= meeting the needs of our members or our organization and this is part of the equation the editor will be considering that when they look at articles, illustrations, and ads.

To the best of my knowledge, there was no further inquiry by any of the signers, but that’s not the same as what I originally wrote here. My apologies for that mistake.

Amy Sterling Casil: I don’t want to see “chilling effects” – there should be an open dialog. I signed it on a pure first Amendment basis, which I requested be noted.

Depending on how you view Bulletingate, I suppose you could point to chilling effects. I know there are people who have assumed the complaints were a vocal minority of thin-skinned, overreacting individuals looking for offense. If you believe that, then yes, it would be consistent to develop a fear that you could be targeted next for the slightest offense.

And here’s where I run up against a wall. Because that’s so completely different from what I saw happen last year. I saw the SFWA Bulletin publish a series of unprofessional (and yes, at times offensive) material, including a poor choice of cover art, multiple articles that — perhaps unintentionally — referred to women in demeaning ways, and a follow-up article accusing critics of being “liberal fascists,” with comparisons to Stalin and Mao, along with references to “thought control.” An article the authors were paid for, in part from my dues.

If you feel that these were appropriate for a professional writers’ organization’s publication, that’s one thing. I would disagree very strongly, but I would understand a bit better where you’re coming from.

But nobody was fired over poor word choice. Nobody was fired over a single cover. Heck, I don’t know that anyone was fired, period. The editor chose to resign (though you could argue she was pushed into it — I don’t know what went on behind the scenes … and neither to most of the other people talking about it), and while I assume the Resnick/Malzberg column is gone, I don’t know the details there.

I don’t know how to wrap this up. I trust that the people who signed that thing believed they had a real and valid basis for their fears of what might happen, but I’m not seeing it. Sure, there are individuals on every side of every spectrum who can be jerks. But I don’t see anything to suggest that people would be banned from publishing in the Bulletin for being a jerk. They might be instructed to keep their paid article on-topic and save the jerkishness for their blog, but that’s a matter of professionalism. I wouldn’t expect the Bulletin to pay me for a 3000-word chat about the awesome LEGO tower I built with my kids, either. Not because SFWA is censoring LEGO-related content, but because it just doesn’t belong in our professional publication.

I believe the creator of that petition was deliberately trying to stir up shit, but I also believe the people who signed it genuinely felt it was an important and necessary stand to take for free speech and expression.

I believe that, but I still can’t bring myself to agree with it.

Fair warning: the comment-eating goblins are standing by if things get nasty or go off the rails.

Autism, Representation, Success – Ada Hoffmann

I don’t remember when I started following Ada Hoffman’s blog. I know it was after my son was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. I believe I had come across some of her reviews of books & stories with autistic characters. Through Ada’s blog, I found a number of other autistic bloggers, and I’ve come away with a great deal to think about. My thanks to her for taking the time to write this guest post.

Tomorrow, we’ll wrap up the week with a post from Katie about gender in genre.

I get a lot of praise, from certain corners, for being a “successful” autistic person. It’s weird for me. I don’t think of myself as an overachiever – frankly, most days I look at myself and only see the things I haven’t done yet. But it is increasingly clear that overachieving is what I do.

I’m only recently starting to unpack how this relates to the way I read and write autism.

There is a curious duality to the way we think of autism and success. It’s always one extreme or the other. “Cure” stories, which show up all over speculative fiction, typify this in the worst way. Here’s a line from a fictional doctor in Nancy Fulda’s awful short story “Movement”:

Without treatment, some children like Hannah develop into extraordinary individuals. They become famous, change the world, learn to integrate their abilities into the structures of society. But only a very few are that lucky. The others never learn to make friends, hold a job, or live outside of institutions.

Be amazing, say the doctors. If you’re not amazing all the time, if you slip up and let yourself look or act disabled, if you have a problem that inconveniences other people in any way – you’ll be one of them. The people with no future. The people who are only ever a burden to others.

This is ableist talk, of course. Horrifically so. “Low-functioning” autistic people get the ableism thrown directly at them, like there’s no possibility they could ever be anything else. “High-functioning” autistic people get it brandished at us from a distance. It’s the stick that’s used to drive us forward. Stop moving, and this is what we will think of you; this is what we will say about you; this is what you will be.

And “forward”, of course, means whatever the doctors want it to mean. It has a lot more to do with pretending to be NT [neurotypical] than it does with real achievement.

This is why I sometimes respond well to stories that don’t show autistic people at our best.

Sheldon from “The Big Bang Theory”, for instance, is a horrible character. He is one absurd stereotype piled on another. From an “objective” standpoint – from the standpoint of NTs evaluating the show in terms of things they can understand, like stereotypes and “depth”, and “realism”, and whether or not the characters are “sympathetic” – there is nothing good to say about him.

But Sheldon doesn’t have to pretend to be NT.

Sheldon is totally unapologetic about who he is. He follows his routines, pursues his own interests, and gives no fucks at all about whether his friends are annoyed. He behaves like this constantly. And the world doesn’t end. No matter how outrageous Sheldon is or how much his friends profess to hate him, at the end of the day, he’s still a part of the group. He has friends. He has a job doing something he loves and is good at. He has money. He has, in later seasons, an autistic girlfriend. He is utterly unsympathetic to the NT characters. Yet he has all the things that doctors tell us we will never have, unless we work constantly, and without fail, at being sympathetic.

To a certain kind of autistic viewer, this is powerful.

Of course, as authors, we can and should do better than Sheldon. We can create much more nuanced portrayals. We can do much more with intersectionality and with the diversity that exists within autism. We can do much more to show that there are midpoints on the spectrum of sucess: that there are, for example, autistic people who do ordinary jobs instead of being a famous physicist, or who rely on support people to a degree while retaining their autonomy, or who live on disability cheques because the job market hates them, but find fulfillment in other activities. That all of this is okay, too. That our worth as humans is not dependent on anyone’s definition of success.

We also need to remember that people who are labeled “high-functioning”, and who have this neurotic relationship with our own success, are not the only autistic people whose feelings matter. That the other end of the spectrum matters too, and that there is not really much of a divide between us at all, except in the way we are treated.

My instinct is an author is to show people like me being happy, and good, and successful – and never too weird, because that would be a stereotype, and never too unsympathetic. And, let’s be fair. I like it when I see autistic people portrayed this way. It makes me feel happy and confident. It’s a valuable thing, and I want to see more of it.

But if this kind of portrayal is where we stop, we are doing ourselves an incredible disservice.

Maybe we, as autistic people, need to be shown warts and all sometimes. Maybe what we need most desperately to see is that we can be visibly disabled, and unsuccessful, and fail to meet NT expectations in all kinds of ways, and be treated with all sorts of horrible ableism, and still be human. And still be lovable and worth something, even if no one else sees it.

I’m not sure I entirely know how to do this. Meda Kahn does it very powerfully with a non-speaking protagonist in her story “Difference of Opinion”. I’m not sure if anyone else has ever done it quite that way. I act like some sort of big autism expert online, and that’s such a lie. There is a ton of this I still haven’t figured out, and I’m still looking and learning, like anyone.

Ada Hoffmann is a Canadian author with Asperger syndrome who blogs about autism in speculative fiction.

The Princess Problem – Charlotte Ashley

Charlotte Ashley’s story struck several nerves with me, both as an author and as a father. (So much so that I can’t even bring myself to joke about Canadians inserting an extra letter U into every third word.) It’s another story that leaves me just sitting here saying, Yes. That. That’s exactly why this conversation matters.

Tomorrow’s guest post comes from Ada Hoffman, and delves into the portrayal of autistic characters.

 

I have never spoken to my daughters about race because I thought I didn’t need to. At least not yet.

We live a fairly privileged existence despite being a low-income, mixed-race family. We’ve carved out a small space in the heart of one of the most multicultural cities in the world, and what we lack in money I like to think we make up in education and community involvement. This is a neighbourhood without an obvious dominant cultural group, and my girls – who are 2 and 5 – see people of every colour in every possible context. We manage “screen time” very closely, and so to date my kids haven’t watched much television beyond Miyazaki movies and nature documentaries. We invest in educational and creative toys rather than “brands.”

In short, we have tried, perhaps naively, to create a sort of post-racial utopia for these kids, in the hopes of delaying the baggage that will inevitably come from being poor, female and brown. I have never spoken to my daughters about race because I thought that the surroundings we have chosen would speak for themselves.

That’s my excuse. I tried, but I was wrong.

#

I realized my bubble of utopia had failed when the kids and I were colouring pictures from a Melissa & Doug princess colouring book, which was a gift. Maggie, my 5-year-old, started hunting for the peach marker because she was colouring the skin, but it was nowhere to be found. There were plenty of other valid skin colours, but she was adamant that princesses can only have peach skin.

“Maggie, give me a break. What colour is your skin?” I asked.

“Brown,” she grumbled.

“Then here. Use this nice light brown.”

She would not be moved. “But it has to be the RIGHT colour!”

5-year-olds are huge on order. They want things to be the way they “should” be. Tigers are orange and have black stripes. Farmers wear overalls. Houses are all single-family detached and nestled in wide, green fields; forget our cramped, urban reality. Kids are big on symbolic representation. The symbol for a princess is a blonde white girl in a pink dress. So it’s a costume, right? One anyone would have to put on to do it right?

“Don’t you want your princess to look realistic?” I tested her. “Real princesses don’t look like that.” She knows this because we’ve looked at pictures of historical “princesses” from all corners of the world, trying to head off this moment.

“Yes they do,” she insisted. “My girl is going to have blonde hair like B.” Her blonde, blue-eyed friend down the street.

So, not only do princesses have blonde hair, they have the same hair as the little white girl. This isn’t simply a symbol, she is mapping the symbol onto her real-life experiences. If B were to be a princess, that would be right. If Maggie were, it would be wrong. Because she’s the wrong colours.

I don’t need to ask how this happens. I know very well she gets this from school, and from our friends’ houses. My friends are concerned about representation too, but as mostly white, middle-class families, they haven’t felt the same urgency to represent diversity in their own houses. They see their daughters playing with their dolls in cool ways (Barbie and Ariel: Demon Hunters) and that convinces them that what the dolls show doesn’t matter because kids make their own messages. But it does matter.

There is an idea out there that brown dolls are for brown kids, so that they can “see themselves” in their playthings. The same attitude exists in media – that we need diverse characters for diverse audiences. But kids notice that their toys are different from their friends’. To them, the one token black princess is an outsider, like the one girl Smurf. Kids don’t relish being the singled-out one. They don’t think being different is quite as cool as we do.

In time my daughters will will learn that there are many ways to be, and some day they will find their places as a freaky but funky iconoclasts and learn how great it is to be different, but we’re not there yet. They are still learning the foundations of their identities, learning their limitations. They’re learning they can’t hit other kids, can’t fly (sadly), and can’t hold their pee forever.

And they’re learning they can’t be princesses.

Representing diversity matters. I’ve been told engineers say “the solution to pollution is dilution,” and they’re right. Next time you pick a toy or a costume or a book, think twice about how you’re contributing to the culture. Got white kids? Get them a black doll. Diversity is for everyone.

Charlotte Ashley is a writer, editor and independent bookseller from Toronto, Canada. Her bookish ramblings can be found at http://charlotteashley.wordpress.com/.

Clicking – Susan Jane Bigelow

Today, please welcome Susan Jane Bigelow, talking about the portrayal of gender and the click of recognition upon finding characters like you. As well as the pain of those characters being played as a source of laughter and disgust.

Tomorrow’s guest post will be by Charlotte Ashley, talking about “The Princess Problem.”

I remember the first time it happened: I was watching “Saturday Night Live” at some point during the early 1990s, long before I’d ever even thought about words like “transgender,” when a sketch came on called “Lyle: The Effeminate Heterosexual.” Dana Carvey played a straight guy whose effeminate mannerisms made everyone assume he was gay. In retrospect it’s incredibly offensive, and even at the time it wasn’t very funny. But at the time I thought to myself, ah! This is what I am!

Because I wasn’t gay. I was just … girlish? Effeminate? I didn’t have any interest in other boys, but I was decidedly un-masculine and sometimes I cross-dressed, so what was I? It was the early 90s in white, suburban America; there were just no other words. Something about Lyle clicked in my teenage mind, and that sketch stayed with me for a long, long time. I’m Lyle, I would think. The effeminate heterosexual!

It didn’t really fit, but at least it was a start. It took me forever to sort out what I was, and where I really wanted to be. My sense of my own gender evolved and changed over time; I wasn’t the sort of person who knew from the age of five and stuck with it. I’m wonderfully clueless in some ways. But I’d still feel that same click of recognition whenever I came across characters in fiction that I knew, somehow, were sort of like me.

For instance, Belize, a drag queen in Angels in America, gave me that sense. Angel in the musical “RENT,” which I was lucky enough to see on Broadway when it was still in previews, was another — here was a man who was very effeminate, and sometimes used female pronouns. Later, I discovered Bel Thorne in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga, a hermaphrodite whose presentation wandered freely across gender lines. I felt that little shock of identification with the gender variance embodied by each of them.

There were a lot of negative portrayals, too. There’s a very obscene reveal of a transgender woman in both Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and The Naked Gun 33 1/3, both of which I saw in the theater. The main characters reacted with disgust; Leslie Nielson’s character runs and throws up in a tuba. The audiences laughed.

I laughed, too, but inside I cringed and pushed that gender variant piece of myself down a little further. I was lucky; I wasn’t really aware of where I was headed yet, or why I felt the way I did. If I’d been more aware, those movies would have crushed me.

After I finally figured it all out and transitioned I started actively looking around for more media, especially in my favorite genres of science fiction and fantasy, where people like me were portrayed positively. There wasn’t much, and there still isn’t — though that’s changing now.

Because of that, I decided to take a risk. My own books were finally coming out, published by the excellent and progressive small press Candlemark & Gleam, and I decided to make the protagonist of the second “Extrahumans” book, Fly Into Fire, a transgender woman. I didn’t put a flashing sign over Renna’s head, but it’s pretty clear in the text who she is.

I hesitated about doing that. I wondered if I was going to be pegged as “that transgender author,” and if I’d find it hard to break out of that mold. I worried about backlash. I also wondered that when I wrote the story “Ramona’s Demons,” an urban fantasy short for the Lambda Award-winning The Collection from Topside Press. But then I thought about how little there was out there, especially in genre fiction, and how important those few positive characters who were enough like me to click had been, and decided it was worth it.

Not every book or story I write has transgender people in it, though I almost always have queer people of one sort or another, and almost all of my protagonists identify as women. I also don’t sell a ton of books. That’s life in the long tail! But every once in a while I get a fan letter from someone saying Thank you for Renna or Thank you for Ramona, and that makes it all worth it.

A big thank you to Jim for hosting this piece, and to all his wonderful readers.

Susan Jane Bigelow is a librarian, SF/F author and political columnist, among other things. She started writing science fiction when she was little, but her first published novel was 2011′s BROKEN (Extrahumans #1). Since then, two more Extrahumans novels, FLY INTO FIRE and THE SPARK, have been published. The first book in a new series, THE DAUGHTER STAR, came out in May, 2013. She writes a weekly political column for the Connecticut political news website, CT News Junkie, where she focuses on politics inside and relevant to the Nutmeg State. She also likes biking, reading, walking, Doctor Who, My Little Pony and all kinds of other things.