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Jan. 21st, 2019 07:34 pm I think in discussing when someone does something wrong in a piece of media - not something you didn't like, or went a direction other than what you expected or wanted them to go in, or that stopped being your thing, but something you want to hold them ethically accountable for - you really have to separate the different types of things that can go wrong.
First, you have the centering of mainstream experiences. In books this is things like talking more about the boy main character than the girl main character, on screen this is everyone being white. That sort of thing. Everyone is going to do that, down to the most marginalized creator you can find, because no one is a member of every marginalized group, and even multiply marginalized people aren't always writing about every single one of their marginalizations. Sometimes it's on purpose, to focus the narrative to a specific theme, message, audience, etc. Usually it's by accident. Anyway, you can't get rid of all your internal biases before you start creating and even if you could there are plenty we don't know about yet because our society hasn't fixed what we've already got enough to figure out who else we're oppressing. The solution here is, I think, to point out what it is that's uncomfortable, and to warn people who strongly dislike engaging with that perspective, and not to say horrible things about the creators or the fans.
Then you have genre-specific replication of themes, tropes, and perspectives. Even someone who's very aware and careful of how they engage with the genres they create in is going to fall victim to these some of the time, and often some of them are necessary to reproduce the genre at all. Again, sometimes this is intentionally subversive, more usually it's something people haven't thought about too hard, or found necessary to the story they were trying to tell. There are ways to lessen the impact of them, but in general that's a lot more effort than it's worth in that it ends up taking up a huge chunk of the story without saying anything at all (or at least anything new or interesting). This is things like racial caricatures that have ended up becoming iconic of various types of worlds, political stances that are baked into the plot arcs, and character archetypes that have very specific sets of trait cooccur. A character in a wheelchair is evil, a poor character automatically becomes rich when he saves the world, a woman dislikes makeup because she likes justice instead. The question here is how much this plays into current expectations of how the world works; if someone would need a lengthy historical explanation of wherein the discomfort lies, then it's a warn-and-move-on situation, but if it's something that would slot right into already formed paradigms of how the world works, then it's something to discuss more at length. Often, this is something a creator can improve on over time, and can be worth encouraging, but in some cases there's no way to get rid of it. This is not necessarily indicative of the stances of an author, and definitely not indicative of the stances of any given fan.
Similarly, you have the historical expectations of the genre. For most popular genres, this means the main character is traditionally a white, abled, neurotypical, non-immigrant, straight Christian/atheist man. (There are exceptions, such as the main character of a romance novel often being a woman, or the main character of queer fiction being a gay man. These are usually subgenres, but often have gained traction and become more popular.) For most genres, creators are trying to set this right by adding in more characters and centering more characters of different races, genders, abilities, sexualities, origins, cultures, etc. A lot of people complain that's erasing the history of the genre, while other people say that it's more harmful to center the problematic history. I think that's an important debate to have outside of fiction, and within fiction simply trying to diversify and move on is enough. I also think someone writing about a hegemonic character should not be enough to make any sorts of claims about them or their fans. This is not something I think has to be addressed when talking about the piece of media or its creators, and is exclusively a symptom of society's construction in general; all activism should be addressing a wider scope than art.
Then you have the ways in which a piece of media can engage with current discussions of bigotry and marginalization. Media can reproduce stereotypes, social proscriptions and prescriptions, mainstream outlooks/expectations/standards, and all kinds of other things. For a work that intends to do this - say, a screed trying to convince more people to be racist - it's more important to ignore it than try to engage the creator in argument. For many creators and many works, they have no audience until people decide to argue; it's important to balance how much visibility to grant that work even when engaging a counterargument for reasons that have nothing to do with the creator. You can assume that the creator has no interest in changing, and neither they nor their core audience will benefit in any way from dissecting that piece of media; finding something else to talk about is probably the best course of action. Be careful when engaging with fans; it's very common for marginalized people, especially those who don't have a lot of media geared toward them, to engage in hostile readings, to consume works in the opposite way the creator(s) intended.
Everything else has to be looked at in tiers. If something is overt and can be pointed out explicitly, blaming the creator for its inclusion is probably warranted, but be sure to find which creator specifically is responsible in the case of collaborative works. Not everyone collaborating has equal voice in the final product. Pointing it out to the fans may be a worthwhile endeavor, but blaming them for it is counterproductive; many people saw it and dealt with it and continued to engage with the work in a variety of different ways, and unless you know which one, there aren't any conclusions to draw anyway. If something is implicit and part of a historical tradition, genre element, or passive bigotry, then it's important to calculate whether bringing it up will do more harm than good. Often, bringing it up in public spaces not already engaged in that conversation will simply cause more stress to already marginalized groups, and in many cases will re-fossilize paradigms that had begun to erode. In other cases, specifically where the implicit bigotry in question is still quite common and transparently tied to a real group in the mind of the average person, it's an important conversation to have. However, since this type of bigotry is neither explicit nor transparent, it takes a lot more conversation to get at exactly what's bad and what a creator should strive to fix. Blaming the creator for inclusion of implicit bigotry is asking too much of people, and instead that should be reserved for people who refuse to listen to counterarguments - however, immediate agreement is also not a good thing, and one should expect a large amount of give and take - and most creators will improve over time. A similar tact should be taken for fans, as implicit bigotry by its very nature is not clear until further discussion; however, it's important to note that not everyone is required to engage in political discussion over their entertainment, and should be left alone if they want to be. Bigotry by exclusion is substantially more complicated to discuss, and unless a marked and intentional absence can be substantiated, is largely something that should be discussed outside the realm of creator ethics, and neither creators nor fans should be held accountable for such a thing. While it can be quite noticeable to certain groups of people, trying to convince a creator to deal with it will only end up with something substantially more offensive, and probably substantially more bigoted.
In general, individual people are not to blame for trends in bigotry, and trying to pin the ethical misstep on individual creators is just another win for neoliberalism. Discussions should take place over a much broader scope, trends in art in general or within a specific genre or style. Specific works can be used as case studies, but greater effort should be made to make clear that they're case studies and not specific people who are doing specific things wrong. This is even more important for the treatment of fans; one specific fan may gravitate toward straight white men in every fandom, but that fan is not the problem, and if an even number of people gravitated toward any given type of character, there would be no problem at all; the problem is in most fans gravitating to straight people, white people, and men. Any given case is not necessarily bad and individual creators should not be held at fault; rather, we should address trends in publishing access, promotion, ways in which things are reviewed, audience reception, etc. Posing an ethical concern to a creator should be restricted to types of bigotry in which a particular piece of the text can be specified, discussed, and rectified in ongoing creation; if someone needs the equivalent of a degree to understand your complaint, you're asking too much of them.
First, you have the centering of mainstream experiences. In books this is things like talking more about the boy main character than the girl main character, on screen this is everyone being white. That sort of thing. Everyone is going to do that, down to the most marginalized creator you can find, because no one is a member of every marginalized group, and even multiply marginalized people aren't always writing about every single one of their marginalizations. Sometimes it's on purpose, to focus the narrative to a specific theme, message, audience, etc. Usually it's by accident. Anyway, you can't get rid of all your internal biases before you start creating and even if you could there are plenty we don't know about yet because our society hasn't fixed what we've already got enough to figure out who else we're oppressing. The solution here is, I think, to point out what it is that's uncomfortable, and to warn people who strongly dislike engaging with that perspective, and not to say horrible things about the creators or the fans.
Then you have genre-specific replication of themes, tropes, and perspectives. Even someone who's very aware and careful of how they engage with the genres they create in is going to fall victim to these some of the time, and often some of them are necessary to reproduce the genre at all. Again, sometimes this is intentionally subversive, more usually it's something people haven't thought about too hard, or found necessary to the story they were trying to tell. There are ways to lessen the impact of them, but in general that's a lot more effort than it's worth in that it ends up taking up a huge chunk of the story without saying anything at all (or at least anything new or interesting). This is things like racial caricatures that have ended up becoming iconic of various types of worlds, political stances that are baked into the plot arcs, and character archetypes that have very specific sets of trait cooccur. A character in a wheelchair is evil, a poor character automatically becomes rich when he saves the world, a woman dislikes makeup because she likes justice instead. The question here is how much this plays into current expectations of how the world works; if someone would need a lengthy historical explanation of wherein the discomfort lies, then it's a warn-and-move-on situation, but if it's something that would slot right into already formed paradigms of how the world works, then it's something to discuss more at length. Often, this is something a creator can improve on over time, and can be worth encouraging, but in some cases there's no way to get rid of it. This is not necessarily indicative of the stances of an author, and definitely not indicative of the stances of any given fan.
Similarly, you have the historical expectations of the genre. For most popular genres, this means the main character is traditionally a white, abled, neurotypical, non-immigrant, straight Christian/atheist man. (There are exceptions, such as the main character of a romance novel often being a woman, or the main character of queer fiction being a gay man. These are usually subgenres, but often have gained traction and become more popular.) For most genres, creators are trying to set this right by adding in more characters and centering more characters of different races, genders, abilities, sexualities, origins, cultures, etc. A lot of people complain that's erasing the history of the genre, while other people say that it's more harmful to center the problematic history. I think that's an important debate to have outside of fiction, and within fiction simply trying to diversify and move on is enough. I also think someone writing about a hegemonic character should not be enough to make any sorts of claims about them or their fans. This is not something I think has to be addressed when talking about the piece of media or its creators, and is exclusively a symptom of society's construction in general; all activism should be addressing a wider scope than art.
Then you have the ways in which a piece of media can engage with current discussions of bigotry and marginalization. Media can reproduce stereotypes, social proscriptions and prescriptions, mainstream outlooks/expectations/standards, and all kinds of other things. For a work that intends to do this - say, a screed trying to convince more people to be racist - it's more important to ignore it than try to engage the creator in argument. For many creators and many works, they have no audience until people decide to argue; it's important to balance how much visibility to grant that work even when engaging a counterargument for reasons that have nothing to do with the creator. You can assume that the creator has no interest in changing, and neither they nor their core audience will benefit in any way from dissecting that piece of media; finding something else to talk about is probably the best course of action. Be careful when engaging with fans; it's very common for marginalized people, especially those who don't have a lot of media geared toward them, to engage in hostile readings, to consume works in the opposite way the creator(s) intended.
Everything else has to be looked at in tiers. If something is overt and can be pointed out explicitly, blaming the creator for its inclusion is probably warranted, but be sure to find which creator specifically is responsible in the case of collaborative works. Not everyone collaborating has equal voice in the final product. Pointing it out to the fans may be a worthwhile endeavor, but blaming them for it is counterproductive; many people saw it and dealt with it and continued to engage with the work in a variety of different ways, and unless you know which one, there aren't any conclusions to draw anyway. If something is implicit and part of a historical tradition, genre element, or passive bigotry, then it's important to calculate whether bringing it up will do more harm than good. Often, bringing it up in public spaces not already engaged in that conversation will simply cause more stress to already marginalized groups, and in many cases will re-fossilize paradigms that had begun to erode. In other cases, specifically where the implicit bigotry in question is still quite common and transparently tied to a real group in the mind of the average person, it's an important conversation to have. However, since this type of bigotry is neither explicit nor transparent, it takes a lot more conversation to get at exactly what's bad and what a creator should strive to fix. Blaming the creator for inclusion of implicit bigotry is asking too much of people, and instead that should be reserved for people who refuse to listen to counterarguments - however, immediate agreement is also not a good thing, and one should expect a large amount of give and take - and most creators will improve over time. A similar tact should be taken for fans, as implicit bigotry by its very nature is not clear until further discussion; however, it's important to note that not everyone is required to engage in political discussion over their entertainment, and should be left alone if they want to be. Bigotry by exclusion is substantially more complicated to discuss, and unless a marked and intentional absence can be substantiated, is largely something that should be discussed outside the realm of creator ethics, and neither creators nor fans should be held accountable for such a thing. While it can be quite noticeable to certain groups of people, trying to convince a creator to deal with it will only end up with something substantially more offensive, and probably substantially more bigoted.
In general, individual people are not to blame for trends in bigotry, and trying to pin the ethical misstep on individual creators is just another win for neoliberalism. Discussions should take place over a much broader scope, trends in art in general or within a specific genre or style. Specific works can be used as case studies, but greater effort should be made to make clear that they're case studies and not specific people who are doing specific things wrong. This is even more important for the treatment of fans; one specific fan may gravitate toward straight white men in every fandom, but that fan is not the problem, and if an even number of people gravitated toward any given type of character, there would be no problem at all; the problem is in most fans gravitating to straight people, white people, and men. Any given case is not necessarily bad and individual creators should not be held at fault; rather, we should address trends in publishing access, promotion, ways in which things are reviewed, audience reception, etc. Posing an ethical concern to a creator should be restricted to types of bigotry in which a particular piece of the text can be specified, discussed, and rectified in ongoing creation; if someone needs the equivalent of a degree to understand your complaint, you're asking too much of them.
