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I recently read through Ellen Datlow and Terry Windling’s anthology The Coyote Road, which isn’t a new release or anything. But hey. Since I took notes on the anthology, I thought I’d share them, for whatever they’re worth (probably not much).

I thought this was an excellent anthology. Anything edited by Ellen Datlow has, in my opinion, a high chance of being excellent, but I was especially impressed by this one. I’ve been reading through the Datlow/Windling fairy tale anthologies recently as well (and may blog about them), and I thought Coyote Road shone in comparison. I don’t know why that is. If i had to take a guess, I’d say that the rewritten fairy tale genre represents territory that’s more trod, particularly by the time Datlow and Windling hit book 5 or 6. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy the fairy tale anthologies, and particularly some of the stories — I do very much like the fairy tale anthos. But I thought that the Coyote Road had a higher overall quality.

In my personal rating system (which is not at all a fair; it’s tilted severely toward giving things low ratings), I rated two of these stories with fives (total adoration), one with a four (strong enthusiasm), eight with threes (enjoyment), two with twos (competent stories that didn’t appeal to me personally for whatever reason), and nine with ones (stories I didn’t particularly like for one reason or another).

My favorite piece from the anthology is Kij Johnson’s Nebula nominated novelette, “The evolution of trickster stories among the dogs of North Park after the Change.” Diatryma says she adores the character, and there is nice character development here of both humans and canines, but I was particularly impressed by the weaving of different types of narratives into this story. It’s an extremely well-rendered balance of scene, meta-fictional intrustion, and mythic stories, all of which add up to an extremely moving piece.

The other story I rated a five was Kelly Link’s “Constable of Abal,” the story of a woman and her daughter who keep ghosts on ribbons. This story has all the best hallmarks of Link’s work: extremely vivid imagery, appealing strangeness, a carefully constructed mood. My most common complaint about Link’s stories is that they are sometimes structurally weak, or have trouble finding an ending, but this story is plotted extremely well and ends satisfyingly without losing the imagery or the mood.

I also enjoyed Ellen Kushner’s “Honored Guest” which makes me want to check out her Swordspoint series. For some reason, I’ve never read any Kushner before. I’m missing something.

Many of the stories in this anthology are well-written, engaging, diverting reads. For instance, Pat Murphy’s “One Odd Shoe” and Delia Sherman’s “The Fiddler of Bayou Teche” are both very entertaining stories that play with interesting characters, settings, and voices, even though neither felt totally fresh to me. I enjoyed reading them, and I’d read them again. Barzak gives some gorgoeus details about Tokyo in “Realer Than You” and Caroline Stevermer made me laugh in “Uncle Bob Visits’swith her ghost who hates diagramming sentences.

I adore Elllen Klages’s work, which may be why I was a trifle disappointed in “Friday Night at St. Cecilia’s,” the perfectly nicely written and entertaining story of a private school girl who plays a board game with Queen Mab. The story as a whole is diverting and fun and was a pleasant read, but I missed the feeling of emotional resonance I’ve found in most other Klages stories.

There were two stories in the anthology — Jebediah Barry’s “The Other Labyrinth” and Jeffrey Ford’s “The Dreaming Wind” — that I wanted to like more than I did. Both had absolutely gorgeous imagery. I’m a sucker for labyrinths of roses and mirrors, not to mention winds that can recreate people in the image of goats or parrots in the image of baby dolls. Unfortunately, I didn’t feel either story was able to bring their stories to a conclusion that suited their vivid beginnings. “The Other Labyrinth” seems to set up one kind of story, and then switch tone in the middle. “The Dreaming Wind” establishes a phenomenon so cool that I never quite forgave the author for refusing to let the event actually happen.

Like “The Other Labyrinth” and “The Dreaming Wind,” Nina Kiriki Hoffman’s “The Listeners” had an extremely compelling beginning — though in the case of that story, I was drawn to characterization and world-building rather than imagery. Unfortunately, I also felt this story tapered off at the end.

The stories in Coyote Road are supplemented by author’s notes, which I love. Will Shetterly argues in his author’s note that author’s notes in general reduce a story’s appeal to that of a “show” with its backstage tricks revealed — I absolutely can’t agree. One thing I enjoy about fiction is being able to enjoy it through multiple facets. Seeing a story from a writer’s perspective does not dim my ability to see it as a reader.

In my usual persnickety way, I read through this anthology haphazardly instead of straight through — and as usually happens, there were a few stories left at the end whose first pages I kept glancing at and going “I don’t want to read that” before flipping to the next piece. I always end up reading those stories last, and it’s possible that I was just done with the anthology’s theme by the time I got to them — but, as always, I enjoyed those stories least. There were four stories in this anthology that I had to push myself to skim. I abandoned those four at their halfway points.

There are a number of stories in this anthology that take on trickster myths directly, particularly a number that engage with Coyote. Of these, I thought the best was Pat Murphy’s “One Odd Shoe.”

However, in general, I wasn’t as fond of the stories that took a direct look at the trickster myths rather than finding different ways of engaging with trickster legends. I love coyote stories — but I love them enough that I’d rather read the originals than derivatives. Kim Antieu’s “The Senorita and the Cactus Thorn,” for instance, was perfectly competent and entertaining enough, but it was sufficiently similar to the style of the original legends that I found myself wanting to go back and reread those instead.

The authors in the anthology take on a number of different kinds of tricksters, from Hermes, to a labyrinth maker descended from Daedelus, to Louisiana fiddlers. I think the anthology would have been improved by a little bit more diversity in terms of the tricksters that authors chose to work with. For instance, I was surprised that no one engaged with Odysseus or Anansi (Edited to add: Ellen Datlow has kindly pointed out that while no stories took on Anansi, there is a Jane Yolen poem in the anthology that works with the spider trickster). I was also disappointed in the only piece that worked with the historically complicated Brer Rabbit narrative.

For me, the most successful stories were those that found unique ways to engage with trickster mythology. Kij Johnson’s is the msot obvious example. In her piece, she’s directly engaging with trickster myths — and with Coyote — but she’s doing so in a way that engages with and recontextualizes the trickster myths, deconstructing them to investigate their cultural traction, and then rebuilding them to create new insights.

This was a really cool anthology, and I highly recommend it.

A bingo card for arguments about whether or not racism can exist in fantasy and/or science fiction.

(Some commenters may be aware of the story and discussion that triggered this bingo card. I’m not going to link to it because I think the story itself is a red herring from this post. I think the use of an undigested trope was ill-advised, but I also believe it was a good-faith error, and that the author’s response to critics is genuine.

This Bingo card is presented A) in response to the comments on that story, and B) in response to the comments on every other story that spawns variations of these poorly formed arguments. As the Angry Black Woman said about the issue, more or less, whether or not one agrees with a specific charge of racism, using arguments out of the handbook for “How to Suppress Discussions of Racism” is NOT the way to prove your point.)

Feminist/womanist, anti-racist commenters only.

Wheelchair Dancer wrote an excellent critique of the ableism in my last post on shades of grey in activism.

The whole thing is below, but you should also check it and her other works out on her blog, Wheelchair Dancer.

On Making Argument: Disability and Language.

We all use disablist or ableist metaphorical language, and I bet most of us say something that is potentially offensive every day: we might be blind to this, deaf to that, pass disabled vehicles, chat about being paralyzed in a situation, etc., etc. I’m often uncomfortable with it — I never use the moron or cretin words — but, honesty here, I do say idiot. I never say, “that’s lame;” I almost never say blind, deaf, paralyzed, cripple, but I occasionally I find myself saying, “that’s dumb,” with full negative rhetorical force. Most of the time, if I slip up the non-disableds I’m with don’t notice; however, the disableds get it, call me on it, and we talk.

If you are feeling a little bit of resistance, here, I’d ask you to think about it. If perhaps what I am saying feels like a burden — too much to take on? a restriction on your carefree speech? — perhaps that feeling can also serve as an indicator of how pervasive and thus important the issue is. As a community, we’ve accepted that commonly used words can be slurs, and as a rule, we avoid them, hopefully in the name of principle, but sometimes only in the name of civility. Do you go around using derivatives of the b*ch word? If you do, I bet you check which community you are in…. Same thing for the N word. These days, depending on your age, you might say something is retarded or spastic, but you probably never say that it’s gay.

I’d like to suggest that society as a whole has not paid the same kind of attention to disabled people’s concerns about language. By not paying attention to the literal value, the very real substantive, physical, psychological, sensory, and emotional experiences that come with these linguistic moves, we have created a negative rhetorical climate. In this world, it is too easy for feminists and people of colour to base their claims on argumentative strategies that depend, as their signature moves, on marginalizing the experience of disabled people and on disparaging their appearance and bodies.

Much of the blogosphere discourse of the previous weeks has studied the relationships between race, (white) feminism and feminists, and WOC bloggers. To me, the intellectual takeaway has been an emerging understanding of how, in conversation, notions of appropriation, citation, ironization, and metaphorization can be deployed as strategies of legitimation and exclusion. And, as a result, I question how “oppressed, minoritized” groups differentiate themselves from other groups in order to seek justice and claim authority. Must we always define ourselves in opposition and distance to a minoritized and oppressed group that can be perceived as even more unsavory than the one from which one currently speaks?

As I watched the discussion about who among the feminist and WOC bloggers has power and authority and how that is achieved, I began to recognise a new power dynamic both on the internet and in the world at large. Feminism takes on misogyny. The WOC have been engaging feminism. But from my point of view, a wide variety of powerful feminist and anti-racist discourse is predicated on negative disability stereotyping. There’s a kind of hierarchy here: the lack of awareness about disability, disability culture and identity, and our civil rights movement has resulted in a kind of domino effect where disability images are the metaphor of last resort: the bottom, the worst. Disability language has about it a kind of untouchable quality — as if the horror and weakness of a disabled body were the one true, reliable thing, a touchstone to which we can turn when we know we can’t use misogynistic or racist language. When we engage in these kinds of argumentative strategies, we exclude a whole population of people whose histories are intricately bound up with ours. When we deploy these kinds of strategies to underscore the value of our own existence in the world, we reaffirm and strengthen the systems of oppression that motivated us to speak out in the first place.

Some background and ground rules. Though I am using Mandolin’s post in detail, I will be referring to her throughout as “the writer.” This is because I am not interested in making an anti-Mandolin conversation. I wish to begin a conversation about disability, language, authority, and power. Mandolin’s post just got me started.

Organizational strategy. That was the theory and conclusions. In the rest of the post are some explanations of how I got there. I’d like to go about this two ways: first talk about details of the post and then talk about implications.

Part 1: Details

But more on the systemic level. We cut off our own feet. If we can’t acknowledge we’re all trapped in racist and sexist systems, systems which compromise our most purely intended actions, systems that prescribe our choices and make us choose between lesser evils… what can we fight?

We commonly talk about us “handicapping” ourselves in a given situation. Here, the writer takes a more literal approach: we become double BKAs (below the knee amputees). This, in itself, might be a small oversight, except that the image of the amputation as a self-inflicted injury is troubling. It is even disturbing because it reaffirms the idea that disabled people are trapped, paralyzed (by their own doing or perhaps not) and helpless — in this case before the forces of evil oppressive systems.

Yes, I know, images and language like this are so routine that they are almost invisible. But that doesn’t make it acceptable. Language and its ideas still have effects. In this case, they are part of a system of images that the writer has begun to use whenever she needs to talk about a powerless situation in the identity and cultural politics wars. The image is not hers to begin with, but she takes it on and takes it over in a title and in the post that follows that title. And then, the same image shows up in, here, in the Grey Activism thread. It’s almost as if amputation of the legs is this writer’s way of indicating the victimization of a well-intentioned person who then becomes helpless either in the face of critical discourse or in the face of discourse systems that have power to wreak havoc on an innocent speaker.

The second detail is an example of how, once it becomes acceptable to take small images in brief words and phrase, it becomes possible to make huge paragraphs:

There’s a personality disorder called Borderline Personality Disorder in which sufferers have a great deal of difficulty understanding ambiguity. They tend to view themselves and others as either entirely good or entirely bad, a switch that will flip with great regularity. On a good day, they are all good. On a bad one, they are the worst person who ever lived. If you give them something they like, you’re an angel; if you speak a harsh word, you’re an evil person conspiring against them.

I tend to drive some of our legalistic commenters here crazy…

This is an awfully generalized description of Borderline Personality Disorder. Short on factual information, it relies on the safety of the You and Them dichotomy: You and those awful Them. And it highlights Their irrationality, Their craziness, Their suffering. The suffering thing is a key point. To use such language is to imply that people are prone to their diagnosis, stripped, in some ways of their personhood — to the point that they can become THEM, a safely otherable pile of flesh. The disability civil rights movement has worked years to educate people on language like this. We don’t “suffer” with our disabilities; we are not our medical diagnoses. To reduce us to our diagnoses is to suggest that there is a fundamental binary of human existence: able-bodied and not. And those who are not, suffer. And it offers an understanding of disability that is wholly medical and awful. There is no natural physical variation, no understanding of how environment and culture contribute to the understanding of disability; there is only the awfulness of BPD. BTW: there’s a tremendous amount of dispute in disability communities about how diagnoses like this are formed. It’s not like irrationality is objective. It’s not like, medically speaking, you do these things and BOOM! BPD.

Essentially, this is a coercive argument by analogy that is successful because of the awful image of BPD it uses. It kind of runs like this. BPD is bad. People who have it aren’t like you and me — they’re irrational. Crazy. And when we do these kinds of things — “trying to define THAT person as evil for THIS compromised act and making that declaration of good or evil a single, solid, reified thing” — we are exhibiting the behaviours of someone with BPD. So, don’t do them. You wouldn’t want to be seen as having BPD, now, would you?

And what to make of the writer’s very next sentence where she declares that she drives people crazy? If you don’t acknowledge the power of the words you wield, the border line between the real and the figurative is very porous.

OK. Enough. I’ve spent so much time on the literal value of the metaphorical details and figurative language because I think not recognizing the literalness of all of this is critical to the next move.

Part 2: Implications

The most important things to me here are one: the fact that one of the people posited throughout the post — the poor liberal who in trying to do good and be complex makes a couple of mistakes — ends up helpless before the dysfunctionality of the politics of the system. And two: the fact that, by the end of the post that person is represented as a double BKA with BPD: a double below the knee amputee with borderline personality disorder. A wacky, helpless, and perhaps dangerously irrational, disabled person. The details may seem small when looked at individually, but that final image is extraordinarily undermining of the disability civil rights movement and of modern progressive understandings of disabled people’s place in society.

Relying on the figurative value of disability metaphors tends to render disabled people invisible; it cuts us out of the conversation. And we are a part of those communities — a necessary part. Disability IS a feminist issue and vice versa (think choice, think end of life, think pre-natal testing, think any part of body autonomy). The constructions and experiences of disability in a divergence of racial and ethnic communities are important to us — for the disability civil rights movement is mainly white. We who are feminist, of colour, and of disability are critical to the conversation, but, to quote Vicki Lewis, we disabled folk are not your metaphor.

And we do experience the exclusion from the conversation in many of the same ways discussed over and over again in the past weeks. Personally, I get tired of trying to bring the disability angle to the table — others I know do, too. As a movement, in our daily lives, and even as a scholarly field in the hallowed halls of academia, disability and disabled people have yet to be recognized as full participants in the conversations about intersecting identities, power, the body, etc. etc.

In the disability movement, we often talk about interdependence and the way all humans are dependent, in some ways, on each other. We use these terms as a way of countering the very material point that disabled people are dependent, non contributing burdens on society, and we use it to challenge the narratives of able-bodied American self-sufficiency. I can’t speak for a very diverse movement, but, to me, one of the signature disability moves is to look for a collaboration that acknowledges the interdependence of all peoples while respecting and valuing their differences. There is no logical need for one of us to leverage off the other: collaboration not competition floats more boats on a rising tide.

So, the next time you need to make an argument about the value of your particular minoritized group, its place in society and culture, its history, etc., I’d ask you to look down and check whose broken back (metaphorically speaking, of course) you are standing on.

Some of my response to the email where she was kind enough to send me this is below the fold.

I feel like liberals are always trying to make conservatives understand that the world and the actions in it are not black and white. If one has done something racist, that doesn’t make them a bad person, it makes them a normal person. We all do bad things. We all do sexist things. That’s not what’s at issue.

White people struggle against the charge of racism because they feel it switches the on-and-off in them, from “good” to “bad.” Since self cannot be perceived as bad, we shout, “No! No! It must not be true! I’m a good person, so I have not been racist!” When, of course, we should be able to look and say, “Oh, I fucked up. I will change. I will fix this.”

There’s a personality disorder called Borderline Personality Disorder in which sufferers have a great deal of difficulty understanding ambiguity. They tend to view themselves and others as either entirely good or entirely bad, a switch that will flip with great regularity. On a good day, they are all good. On a bad one, they are the worst person who ever lived. If you give them something they like, you’re an angel; if you speak a harsh word, you’re an evil person conspiring against them.

I tend to drive some of our legalistic commenters here crazy (sorry, Sailorman) because I don’t believe the world has boundaries that can be clearly described between good and bad. We all, along with our every action, inhabit ambiguity. Every good thing we do has bad unintended consequences. Every bad thing we do has good unintended consequences. We’re all shaded. We’re all compromised. No one’s clean or pure. No one’s evil or tarnished beyond recognition.

This is not a profound thought, expressed in the abstract, and yet I see it abandoned with great regularity when we move into concrete examples. I’ve seen it over and over and over again, and I find it so frustrating in liberal circles. We should know better. I wish we did. But we’re so ready for conflict, to make sharp decisions, to slice things and people into black and white until, as Ampersand says, we construct people “as only their worst moments.”

There’s this drive toward perfectionism in the activist soul, toward making perfect the enemy of good.

It’s so, amazingly damaging. On the personal level, yes — I could talk about bloggers who I can’t stand to read, but who I nevertheless respect, but I don’t really want to bring individuals into it.

But more on the systemic level. We cut off our own feet. If we can’t acknowledge we’re all trapped in racist and sexist systems, systems which compromise our most purely intended actions, systems that prescribe our choices and make us choose between lesser evils… what can we fight? What’s the point? How are we different than ascetics with whips to use on ourselves and others for the greater good of purgation?

We can’t purge our souls.

When it comes to racism, we understand that it’s not the intent that matters, it’s the effect. It’s not apportioning blame that’s relevant, it’s creating solutions. So why are we stuck in circles, trying to define THAT person as evil for THIS compromised act and making that declaration of good or evil a single, solid, reified thing? Why do we, as a collective, exhibit some features of Borderline Personality Disorder?

I don’t think the human brain is set up very well to perceive shades of grey, which is too bad, because concepts with borders around them like black and white are only our own constructions for understanding the world, and they are badly insufficient tools.

–

Given the context of recent blogosphere battles, I want to say that I realize some may read this post as being about Amanda and/or Amanda’s critics. It isn’t intended to be. I understand that there’s a great deal of history there which involves more than black and white decision making. This post was written in reaction to a different conversation.

I also don’t mean to say there should be no critique of anyone. Critique is important — it’s vital that it be passionate and vehement and present, for otherwise nothing would change. I mean only to question a particular kind of critique, that variety of righteous condemnation which seems to be about making sense of the world by casting it with angels and devils instead of struggling players.

Feminist, anti-racist comments only. (If I bold this and put it at the end, will people pay attention? –post-mod queue Mandolin.)

Time for a follow-up. When is criticism like “wilding?” Never. Never. NEVER.

Unless, of course, you’re a racist trying to defend friends from people of color.

It is possible to describe criticism coming from people of color in a way that doesn’t equate words with violence. The criticism is fervent; it’s angry; it’s passionate; it’s vehement. If one disgarees with it, one could call it overblown, exaggerated, vicious, cruel, unreasonable, stupid, ridiculous, douchebaggy, mean-spirited, made in bad faith, irrational.

Who is the primary target of historical and present racialized violence? People of color. Black men lynched; black women raped; Chinese men slaughtered; Native American’s scalps collected and turned into the government for cash; Native American women systemically sterilized against their wills until 1975 so that 1/3 of child-bearing aged Native American women had undergone a (usually involuntary) hysterectomy; Chinese women imported for prostitution; Japanese people caged ni internment camps; Indigenous peoples all over the globe shoved aside to make room for colonial conquest; and so, so much more.

Amanda and Seal Press are being critized. Their lives are not in danger. Their physical integrity is not in danger. They are not being dragged through the town square. They are not being “handed a rope.” They are not being lynched, wilded, or raped.

This language suggests actual physical threats that are historically and presently used against people of color in general, and particularly people of color who stand up against racism. It uses that language to suggest that citicism from people of color is equivalent to these actions. Black men are slaughtered by policemen who fire into a car full of unarmed men and white women are criticized with harsh, unflinching language.

These are not equivalent.

And even if you think it’s clear as crystal that Amanda and Seal Press are being unfairly and hyperbolically impugned, it should be really easy to see why.

See also my original post about hyperbolic language being used to describe criticism coming from people with less privilege than one has.

(Feminist, anti-racist commenters only.)

On Pandagon, Amanda writes:

I’m sorry. Plain and simple. I didn’t pick the offensive imagery in my book, but I should have caught it sooner than now. I didn’t and there’s no excuse. It was my first book, I was excited and happy, but I needed to have a more critical eye. I would do anything to remove racist images from the first printing of the book if I could, and I am relieved and happy to say that they will be removed from future printings.

Since the book is currently in its second printing, Seal Press is already removing the offensive images. They write:

Please know that neither the cover, nor the interior images, were meant to make any serious statement. We were hoping for a campy, retro package to complement the author’s humor. That is all. We were not thinking.

As an organization, we need to look seriously at the effects of white privilege. We will be looking for anti-racist trainings offered here in the Bay Area. We want to incorporate race analysis into our work.

Although the apology from Seal Press is not 100% satisfying in it’s wording, I congratulate them for understanding (with prompting) that these images, combined with their extremely problematic response to women of color discussing their publishing diversity, indicate a problem with them not their critics. I wish them the best of luck in addressing it.

Seal Press, if I were you, I would go straight to the Angry Black Woman or Nojojojo, both of whom I can personally attest are excellent writers (and ABW an experienced editor), and ask if either would be willing to edit a collection of articles for you on any subject she desires, even if it’s the lack of diversity in the publishing industry with an article about Seal Press in it. I don’t know if either of them would have time or inclination to take you up on it — they’re legitimately pissed at you — but if they did, you would end up with a clearly excellent collection of articles. That would just be my first step.

Alternately, if someone could help you find BFP, and if she had time and inclination, I’m certain her writings could be compiled into an excellent text.

Oh, and drop everything and go read this post from Angry Black Woman on how to promote diversity in fiction markets. It’s not 100% salient to non-fiction publishing, but it’s close enough.

I am very pleased that the book will soon be available without this offensive imagery. I’ve only excerpted from these apologies; I suggest you read further yourself.

I imagine many people will be wondering why Amanda apologized about this issue, while staying silent on her own blog about appropriation. Only Amanda can answer that, though I suspect the answer has something to do with her feeling she did something wrong here and not in the other instance. To the extent that my desires are relevant (i.e. about 0%), I’d urge Amanda to address the appropriation issue on her blog. Even if she doesn’t feel she appropriated, she could easily mention the controversy, apologize for whatever portion of it she feels rests on her shoulders (and surely she can agree that appropriation is a systemic issue, and one she and many other white people have participated in without intention or conscious knowledge, if not in this instance specifically, then surely in others) and compile a set of links to salient works by women of color. Even if those links don’t feel like direct sources to her, they would certainly be excellent reading for her audience, and what is there to lose? More sets of eyes on excellent, progressive writing by women of color? Oh, please don’t throw me in that briar patch.

UPDATESeal Press has updated their apology with the following:

Please note that, upon reflection, we realize that the second to the last paragraph of this post doesn’t do a good job of conveying our intended meaning. We do not want to delete it, but we do want to make a note around our intent, since its purpose was to further articulate the “what were they thinking?” question. We apologize that this paragraph undermines our apology. We acknowledge that the images are racist and not okay under any circumstances. We are wholeheartedly sincere in our apology, and the actions we’ve laid out above will be acted upon immediately.

(Feminist, anti-racist comments only please.)

Heart would like the world to know that there really are no problems with the racist illustrations in It’s a Jungle Out There because those illustrations happen to have been called out on this blog:

On the day that Ampersand, of Alas a Blog, gets taken to task for — every single blessed day – benefitting from the sale of blatantly racist, misogynist pornography on his website, advertised not just by way of text but with pornographic imagery, photographs, maybe on that day I’ll take all of this outrage against Amanda, by people who suck up to Ampersand (and others who share Amp’s views) every single day, posting or commenting to his blog like they have some shred of sense, decency, or concern for female persons, seriously.

…On the day that Maia recognizes the seriousness of the presence of misogynist, racist pornographic images and text on Alas – where she regularly blogs – I’ll take her concerns about Seal Press and Amanda’s book seriously. When any of the crowd currently excoriating Amanda Marcotte begins to take racist, misogynist male pornographers and their apologists to task, I’ll view them as possibly having some shred of credibility, a leg to stand on, in criticizing Amanda Marcotte.

Apart from the fact that it’s obviously fallacious to assume that because someone disagrees with her — or is even provably wrong — on one subject, that will automatically taint their perspective on any other subject, I find this a pretty facile way of ignoring the problems that other feminists have raised outside Alas, many of them predating our postings.

It should be noted that I’m the only one calling Heart hypocritical and full of shit. Barry, for some reason unfathomable to me, actually has a great deal more respect for her than I do. So, if you’re offended, be offended at me, not him or Maia.

(Shocker: Feminists, anti-racist comments only. Probably best to assume any further posts I make to this site are such.)

This is amazing. Brownfemipower:

The thing is—I thought that those who were a part of a “feminist community” were held to the same sort of standards. That when a woman of color says that she will not be published thus the white women who are published need to spend more time than they feel comfortable talking about the needs of women of color—THEY WOULD DO IT. That they would say “It’s the least I can do” or “What else can I do” rather than JUST DO IT, JUST DO IT. Because we are all in a community together and we all are working to create something that challenges and dismantles gendered violence and inequality, right? And if it takes writing a book that does not assume all women are staying away from feminism because they are white and privileged and just don’t get it—well, ending gendered violence and inequality is worth it, right? Working together towards a common goal, right?

This?

It just took reading Hugo’s response for me to realize that I was fucked up wrong. That feminism’s goals and my goals are completly and totally opposite of each other. That in feminism’s eyes “dismantling” gendered violence= “shifting” gendered violence.

Well. To me, this looks like a really glaring fallacy. “Feminism” is not one thing, and I don’t accept the idea that one set of people (say, Hugo) has more right to the term than another (say, Sylvia), when both clearly are interested in ending patriarchy. Also, what Anxious Black Woman said:

I’m just reminding everyone that the “Feminist” label belongs to us, as women of color. We laid the foundations for feminist theory and practice. We are the bodies on which feminist theories are created. We are the “comparative” variable and the case study for why “life sucks for women.” It’s because of the combined effects of sexism, racism, imperialism, heterosexism, etc. why we’ve got it bad. And it’s because we “bleed at the intersections” why we, more than any other group of women, need feminist movement.

(By the way, that whole post is really amazing and informative and I recommend you read it.)

For me, it’s really problematic when BFP writes this:

“Feminists,” on the other hand, are not movement building, they are actively destroying women and blaming those women for the destruction. They are saying the point of feminism is “equality with men” without even thinking to acknowledge that “equality with women” is just as admirable of a goal and maybe even possibly the first step to achieving the goal of equality with men. They are saying, Just do it, just do it, JUST FUCKING DO IT.

BFP seems here to be defining feminists as people who subscribe to these behaviors. That ignores lots of women who don’t and who aren’t rejecting feminism. The fact that there *is* an argument in the feminist blogosphere indicates to me that there are feminists who believe as BFP is asking them to. Why write them off? Why are certain people more entitled to the label feminism?

I do fully understand that BFP is more educated than I am on these issues, and more articulate, and probably just plain smarter. But I find this part of her argument really frustrating.

When I stop to think “what am I missing here?”, I feel like what I’m missing is the real frustration and desperation and anger that accompanies these sentiments. I am truly missing them, and I do not wish to deny their legitimacy.

But at the same time when I think of my feminist influences — for instance Carolyn Martin Shaw, a black anthropology professor of mine who teaches on gender and sexuality and has organized women’s movements in Kenya — I… can’t really fathom ascribing to her the motives BFP professes belong to “feminists,” not can I fathom removing the label feminist from her because “feminism” — in BFP’s outline — means the (as far as I can tell) deliberate trampling of WOC. She’s a feminist.

I know, I know, if the shoe doesn’t fit, don’t wear it.

Still. The only way I can reconcile these thoughts is to assume that there’s a difference between feminists and “feminists,” the same way there’s a difference between nice guys and NiceGuysTM — but if that’s the case, why not say so? I’m not reading this as an accusation toward individuals, but toward the moral quality of the entire movement (which thus requires its rejection, instead of merely the renouncements of “feminists”).

Feminist, anti-racist comments only.

It is undeniable that there are systemic issues at stake. Holly tried to have a conversation about them over at Feministe; it didn’t work. I’m going to make a stab and say that it might be able to work here because there are separate threads here. You want to rail against individual instances of recent tumult? Wander over to Barry’s and have a non-personally-insulting swing.

Please discuss systemic appropriation here.

I’ll start: I’m mostly familiar with the concept of appropriation in an anthropological context, where exoticism and colonial economic factors are more salient than they seem to be here, and where source citing is emphatically NOT a solution. Moreover, I’m mostly familiar with the intersection of appropriative writing and anthropology, where you end up with problematic orientalist fantasies and that sort of thing. I’m not used to thinking about it in an academic context. It’s interesting. I’m up for reading anyone’s explorations of the concept.

*

Update: from comments, because I think it might stimulate conversation / clarify where things are coming from / etc.:

Sailorman asks, refering to the incident that started this discussion, “isn’t this more an issue of attribution than appropriation?”

My reply:

I have opinions on this, but I’m not sure I can get into them without getting into what it seems to me has happened here, which I’m trying to avoid because A) it makes me tired, B) it seems non-productive, and selfishly C) I’m sure it would erode my credibility with *someone* who I respect and I greatly respect people on both sides of this debate.

Um, so, generally:

I think the idea proposed by the, um, plaintants? in this situation is that appropriation occurs when attribution is not acknowledged.

This is particularly problematic in situaitons charged by systemic oppression because some people’s words are taken more seriously than others. If you read enough feminist writing, you generlaly hit upon a few anecdotes where someone mentions that a woman proposed something in say a meeting which was ignored, but when the woman’s male partner repeated it, suddenly everyone said, “Oh! What a good idea!”

(On a mostly irrelevant side note — In my relationship, actually, the opposite is likely to happen — I’m much more likely to be able to convince people of things than my male partner, as I’m more charismatic and verbally inclined than he is.)

But in general, you see white people’s words as privileged over non-white people’s, and men’s over women’s. There’s an anecdote in Holly’s post about her thoughts as an Asian woman having been privileged over those of a black woman.

These dynamics appear to play out in the blogosphere. For instance, it’s probably not coincidental that many of the first influential feminist bloggers were male — see, importantly, Barry. Who is totally the bee’s knees, in my opinion. But it’s legitimate to point out that his words about feminism are sometimes taken more seriously than if a mere woman says them.

In this case, the allegation is that a white woman’s words are taken more seriously — because of her megaphone on the internet, and because of the privilege that allowed her to obtain that megaphone, and so on — than the words of women of color which have come before.

Now. That’s all, um, factual. I think. It’s systemic. It’s about privilege and disadvantage, and who’s heard, and so on.

The appropriation angle is more subjective and more sticky, and I am not going to try to endorse or reject the claims — although as mentioned, I do have opinions, blah blah. So, to try to keep the conversation systemic:

If, systemically, a white woman can say ideas that a black woman can also say and get more attention for it, then it becomes problematic when she repeats those ideas. Because, all of a sudden, people are paying attention. If she doesn’t attribute those ideas to their sources, then the words of the people who originated them disappear. The black women’s words are subsumed and become assumed to be those of the white woman — they are appropriated by her, intentionally or unintentionally.

So, it’s both attribution and appropriation. Through lack of attribution, it becomes appropriation.

Here, attribution can stand in — in a sort of generic, not totally accurate way — for money. Take an example that science fiction writer N. K. Jemisin brought up last year at Wicson: mass-marketed Western shirts that look Chinese.* Chinese people are making real Chinese shirts. Westerners are taking an idea of what’s Chinese, appropriating it, changing it in a way so that it actually reflects more of a Western idea of whta Chinese is than any actual reality of what Chinese actually is, and then they mass-market it and make lots of money. Money is the measure of worth here, and the way you see how people are benefitting from ideas.

In academic exchange, attribution is a measure of worth and credit. So, without attribution, the idea-originators get neither worth nor credit — just like the people making real Chinese shirts (or making the African art objects that they get small amounts of money for that western art dealers make huge amounts of money off of, or whatever). It’s a matter of worth, credit, money, value, whatever, being given to the priveleged person instead of the person who did the work of coming up with the idea / making the objects / etc.

–

*and here’s a good example of something that almost became non-attribution and thus appropriation. If I were speaking in conversation, I might or might not source N. K. Jemisin as the origin of the analogy — mostly because I would fear losing my audience by sounding overly academic, with attribution. I certainly would if they knew her or knew of her, but I might skip it if I were talking to a creative writing student, for instance, about a story they’d written, and trying to explain orientalism to them. I think that would be basically okay in that situation, but it would be patently bad here, where people even have the ability to follow up (and do! N. K. Jemisin rocks). I had a moment of wondering whether I should credit her, though, because I can’t remember if her blogging handle is associated with her SF name, and I am hesitant to actually *link* her because god knows, I wouldn’t want to out her if she’s not out. Anyway. Point is, if I didn’t attribute (in this relatively formal discussion setting and in writing, particularly) the idea to N. K., I would have been appropriating it.

This is exceptionally clear beacuse I’m pulling from her analogy directly — as I remember it — and she is definitely, 100% the source of it entering my concsiousness.

*

(Shockingly, this is a feminist and anti-racist thread. I’d screw with the comment rules, but I don’t feel like it, so just respect that, eh? Merci.)

Has anyone else found that the story of the mutilating gynecologist terrifies them beyond all proportion to the story? I am shocked by the vividness and durability of my reaction to it, given how inured I am to other news stories.

People in other threads commented that the article reads like a horror movie, and I think there’s good reason for that. This is the stuff of horror stories. And like horror stories, it functions by tapping into shared anxieties — in this case anxieties to which I think I am particularly vulnerable, as someone who has always been easily upset by things relating to health and medicine.

Still. I’m trying to remember the last time I felt haunted by a news story, to the extent that I felt nauseous and lines from it echoed in my head all day. I was pretty terrified by the anthrax scare right after 9/11 related to the reports of the “plume of white dust,” illogical as it was (I was close to the towers, and also 19 and stupid). It must have happened since then, but I can’t remember when.

I hate that my terror would no doubt satisfy the sociopathic gynecologist, but I’m not going to waste time berating myself for my visceral response.