Representation and fiction
When I started writing professionally, I wanted to tell compelling stories about interesting and unfortunate things happening to interesting and unfortunate people. Like many beginning authors, my fiction was more informed by prior art than by the world around me – I wrote stories that looked and sounded like the genre stories I’d grown up with. My characters, as a result, were overwhelmingly white, male, and when their sexual identities were considered at all, straight and cis-gendered.
The lack of female, person of color, and LGBT representation – in my own work, and in the media I consumed – didn’t occur to me. That was the luxury that my privilege afforded me. I know that some people feel a sense of social fatigue with that word – privilege – but it’s a simple word for a complicated concept. And it fits. I was privileged enough to not even realize how sheltered I was.
The Mission
As I developed as an author and aged as a human being, nuance crept both into my work and into my perception of reality. When I branched off into screenwriting I learned how reluctant the established creative structure was to branch off away from what society has designated to be the ‘default’ or ‘mainstream’ demographic. When I began to look into forming my own production company, my partner and I saw the opportunity to address these problems of representation.
The woman I was forming the company with, actor and artist Kat O’Connor, shared an anecdote with me. When she was ten, she would write stories featuring boys her age, as self-insert protagonists despite the fact that she was a girl. She literally could not see someone like her performing in a heroic role.
I find that incredibly sad.
Inspiration Strikes
We knew we wanted to address the issue with the art we created, but weren’t really able to articulate it until we saw a couple of panels at C2E2: Opening the Clubhouse Doors: Creating More Inclusive Geek Communities and Glass Ceilings, Missing Stairs, and Gatekeepers, presented by the Chicago Nerd Social Club, and the Gay Character and Creators Panel, presented by Geeks OUT.
This coincided with the production class I’d been taking’s assignment to come up with a company mission statement. Inspired by the panels I’d sat through and encouraged by my partner, I composed the following:
Burning Brigid is a Chicago-based production company that aims to contribute to a cultural shift through narratives that normalize stories about the traditionally marginalized, presenting them as people, rather than genres.
The key is normalization. We feel that women, minorities, and LGBT people aren’t just under-represented, they’re poorly represented. Issues of identity and self are reduced to character ticks. Entire demographics are reduced to a handful of tropes and pushed together into a genre.
I don’t want that. I don’t want to write “Hispanic Characters” or “The Gay Guy” or “LGBT Fiction.” I want to write stories about believable people, some of whom happen to be gay, or black, or transgendered, or women, or men, or white. I want to write these characters as if they’re normal. Because they are, and their stories are normal, even if they may face unique struggles.
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