A Serious Talk About Co-optation

A couple days ago Jessewave had a guest post from Real Life Gay(TM) Stuart questioning whether M/M tropes had currently crossed over into co-optation territory. "What an awesome post," I thought. Virtual high-fives all around.

Then today I saw a post from Voinov about how TERRIBLE and WRONG it is that people in the M/M community are telling female writers they're NOT ALLOWED to write M/M because they don't have the gay men expertise. Only gay men can tell authentic stories, blah, blah, blah...

"Oh not this again!" I thought. And like many of you I leaned over to click the 'like' button before I'd read the post-- thankfully something made me stop ... I clicked through to see the original post made by Megan Derr first. And then-- thinking smugly "I have got to see the asshat who kicked this off"-- I clicked through to the post Derr was replying to.

And found myself staring at the Jessewave post.

What's funny about this situation is there's simply nothing in Stuart's post that talks about whether women are allowed to write M/M. NOTHING. He doesn't say it directly, he doesn't imply it indirectly. What he does do is speculate that the current batch of tropes comes from a combination of well meaning ignorance from majority female writers and what is marketable and desirable to the female readership that makes up most of the genre. That's no where near the same thing.

And ... as can be expected when you imply that a group of people used to patting themselves on the back are maybe contributing in some small way to a problem, the shit storm began.

The sad thing is ROMANCE (not just M/M) does have a serious co-optation problem and a good opportunity to discuss it has been lost. I can't allow that :/

What Is Co-optation?
Co-optation (also referred to as cultural appropriation) happens when a majority group repurposes elements of a fringe/minority culture for their own purposes. The classic example is the Native American headdress and the modern day hipster. The Native American wears the headdress for a specific cultural reason, the hipster wears it to be "cool".

Co-optation becomes a problem when the majority's usage starts to subvert the fringe group's. This is damaging because to the majority the element is usually just a trend, it's fun, it's aesthetically pleasing, whatever-- whereas to the minority group the element being co-opted is a part of a shared identity. The minority group is losing something important and significant so that the majority group can have some fun. In the end, trends will shift, the majority group will lose interest and find something new to be "cool" but the minority group does not get their identity back. Think of the swastika. It's been-- what?-- almost seventy years since the dissolution of the Nazi party, can Hindus and Buddhists go back to using the symbol the same way they once did? Nope. That's what sucks about co-optation.

How Does This Happen in Romance?
Let's not make this about M/M, because it's not exclusive to M/M. Few BDSM stories reflect the BDSM community accurately, almost no menage stories even try to get poly lifestyle right, and don't get me started about rape fantasy ;)

Fantasy by itself is not a problem. I don't like stories about weepy bottoms and their seven foot, muscly, manly tops but I don't find them OFFENSIVE. Writing about a particular situation that is not your own situation is not in and of itself co-optation .

It BECOMES co-optation when these tropes become the only stories that people are allowed to tell. When writers are pressured by editors and publishers to change their stories to fit a particular mold. When books that were never published as romance novels are forced into the genre and subsequently dismissed as being subpar when they fail to provide the desired fantasy. When it becomes impossible for novels to become successful if they do not provide the fantasy the majority wants.

Again: co-optation happens when a majority group takes over elements of a minority group's identity and experience for no other reason than titillation and entertainment.

Chill Out, Co-optation Doesn't Make You a Bad Person
This is a fight I fight all the time as a woman in a technical profession. It's so difficult to get my nerdy boy colleagues to understand that the problem is not whether or not they are biased. Biases are naturally and unavoidable. The problem is how they RESPOND to the bias.

In the same way, Co-optation is just a natural process. As ideals become popular they lose some of their original meaning ... regardless of how careful and "respectful" people try to be. The fact that you have written or enjoyed some of the tropes described in Stuart's post does not make you a bad person. It's how you respond to people like Stuart pointing out issues with your use of their identity that matters.

How to Handle Co-optation - Step One: Listen
The crime of co-optation is that the voices and experiences of the minority get SILENCED. The easiest way to enjoy your M/M fantasy and keep the genre becoming co-optative is to keep an open mind to different perspectives. You don't have to read stories you don't like or change your reviews, but you do have to give space to other voices.

Which means, for example, when a gay man writes an intelligent guest post about how many M/M tropes do not reflect his experience and how maybe this bothers him, don't throw a hysterical hissy fit about how HE is oppressing YOU.

Step Two: Embrace and Reclaim Your Niche
You like what you like. There's no shame in that ... so stop acting ashamed of it. You know what fuels most of the co-optation I've seen in Romance? People being ashamed of the label "Romance readers"

Self-conscious of the stigma of one label, suddenly readers and writers "rebrand" themselves as something else. "M/M Romance" becomes "GBLT Fiction" and "Romance" becomes "Erotica"... There. That sounds so much classier, doesn't it?

Except the books themselves don't change. What happens to the people who were writing and reading GBLT Fiction (as in novels about the GBLT experience that don't necessarily involve any love interests) before you decided it sounded better? How do their writers find the right readers now that their genre is being flooded with hundreds of new books that don't have anything to do with what they write?

Like a new species introduced into an existing ecosystem, when we rebrand M/M as something else we make it harder for fringe voices to survive. We lose diversity and start co-opting.

So don't do it. Don't rebrand. Embrace your niche. As someone who went to school in Japan and did my thesis on social-economic undertones of yaoi (yes, really. My advisor loved it) ... the only thing more annoying to me than seeing a bunch of western romances labelled "yaoi" is listening to a bunch of western romance fans define "yaoi". Stop it. Tacking a manga style cover on something and making one of the boys super effeminate does not make something "yaoi". Calling something "yaoi" does not make it more sophisticated/cultured/worldly/etc. You know what it does do? Make it that much harder for fans of yaoi to connect with like minded individuals.

A writer who can't find his audience is a silenced voice. You don't have to start reading things you're not interested in, you do have to stop taking over other genres because OMG that name sounds so much cooler!

Step Three: Realize That There Is No GLAAD Award For "Best Reader"
I feel like controversies like the Stuart post wouldn't happen as often if people stopped trying to ascribe higher meaning to their love of hot guy-on-guy action. I see A LOT of readers/writers behave like the simple act of powering on the Kindle is a meaningful show of solidarity with the gay community. Like it's the equivalent of marching in the Pride parade or campaigning for marriage equity.

And so understandably these people get very threatened when someone implies that what they write or what they like to read might actually be hurting the community. They get defensive. They overreact. They make this community a unwelcoming place for different voices ... ironically many of those voices turn out to belong to actual gay men.

But this is silly. I can think of no situation where great social injustices have been corrected through porn (well okay maybe Deep Throat but only indirectly!). If you want to show your support for the gay community, do it with your actions, not with what you gets you off.

The best way to keep M/M open and respectful of the gay community is to be honest about its significance. I think Emma put it best:

I read m/m as a play space in which we, the readers and writers, wear male avatars. M/m is not about gay men any more than it is about vampires, dance competitions, or giraffe shifters. M/m explores the panoply of human relationships (and sometimes, lack of relationships: see Doubtless). The genre plays with the notion of a traditional hetero binary, with triads, with ideas of power exchange, with ideas of equality.

Yes! And there's no reason why this play can't peacefully coexist with more realistic depiction of real-life-gayness, but we have to allow them to coexist which means we have to check our egos at the door, be honest about what we really want in a story and stop trying to rebrand ourselves into "coolness".