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hrjA lot of good blog topics start out, “So somebody asked me about ....” Well, nobody asked me about this, but it would be a very excellent question and I’m kind of surprised nobody has. Let’s pretend it happened. So nobody asked me, “Heather, given that you write stories with lesbian protagonists, why the heck do you put them in oppressive historic settings? Why not put them in contemporary settings? After all, it’s rather an exciting time to be non-heterosexual in the USA. Or futuristic settings where we can imagine that prejudice will be entirely eliminated? If you’re going to create secondary world fantasies, why use ones that carry over prejudice from our own past? Why not create a fantasy world -- even a pseudo-medieval one -- where being LGBTQ simply isn’t an issue?”
See? That would be a really great question. Why hasn’t anyone asked me that? (I’ll tell you anyway.)
I think it’s wonderful that the legal and social context I live in is more just than the one I was born into (though still far from as just as it ought to be). When I was born, being lesbian was considered a mental illness. Being open about it meant risking your job, your friendships, maybe even your freedom if you were still under age. When I realized I was a lesbian and began coming out, I assumed that it meant cutting myself off entirely from some important parts of life: from having children, from the possibility of getting married, from having my partner accepted as “family” by my parents and siblings. I would have found it impossible to imagine that the progress we’ve seen would happen during my lifetime: that marriage would be an option, that legal equality would be a (still incomplete) possibility, that children would (in some contexts) feel as free to express developing same-sex desires as to express developing opposite-sex desires. And if I were born today, and grew up in this new world we’re building, I might be impatient with looking backward to the “bad old days” and want to imagine only stories in which all sexualities (and genders) were equal and where it didn’t matter who my characters loved.
But I wasn’t born today. And for me it matters very much. It matters to me that I love women and not human beings in general. It matters to me that I spent most of my life not seeing myself and the things that matter to me reflected in the culture around me or in the history and literature that I loved. I feel it like the weight of a vast debt. Like an empty hole in the world that pulls on my soul like a gravity well. In a couple generations, perhaps we will have moved far enough from that well that the effects will barely be felt. But I still feel wisps of my soul being pulled off and sucked down into that abyss every time I open a book that fails to reflect my experience.
I still straddle that gap: between an era that denied and erased my existence and one that seems to aspire to deny and erase my difference. It is, perhaps, a worthy aspiration. I’m not sure. (I’m reminded of the time I attempted to explain to someone why members of Deaf culture could be deeply unsettled by an emphasis on “curing deafness”. I’m not going to go further with that analogy here. If you see the parallel, good; if you don’t, it would derail my point.)
In straddling that gap, I’m all too reminded of how different my life would have been in I’d been born a decade earlier...a generation...a century...a millennium. I want to explore the ways of being that would have been possible for me in a previous age. I want to figure out who and what I might have been in those spaces. I need to “Occupy History”, in the idiom of modern social politics, and stake a claim for me and mine in that vast territory that tried to erase us. And, for me, that “vast territory” includes the imaginative fantasy worlds that I have loved all my life despite their blithe assumption of my non-existence.
I sometimes feel like part of a lost generation in terms of literature. By the time it became possible to write the stories I hungered for, those stories were considered too tame, too traditional, insufficiently transgressive. But that vast literary debt still stands unpaid. I write in history, and in historic fantasy, because I want to help to fill that abyss with enough stories to content it, such that it no longer hungers for my soul.
See? That would be a really great question. Why hasn’t anyone asked me that? (I’ll tell you anyway.)
I think it’s wonderful that the legal and social context I live in is more just than the one I was born into (though still far from as just as it ought to be). When I was born, being lesbian was considered a mental illness. Being open about it meant risking your job, your friendships, maybe even your freedom if you were still under age. When I realized I was a lesbian and began coming out, I assumed that it meant cutting myself off entirely from some important parts of life: from having children, from the possibility of getting married, from having my partner accepted as “family” by my parents and siblings. I would have found it impossible to imagine that the progress we’ve seen would happen during my lifetime: that marriage would be an option, that legal equality would be a (still incomplete) possibility, that children would (in some contexts) feel as free to express developing same-sex desires as to express developing opposite-sex desires. And if I were born today, and grew up in this new world we’re building, I might be impatient with looking backward to the “bad old days” and want to imagine only stories in which all sexualities (and genders) were equal and where it didn’t matter who my characters loved.
But I wasn’t born today. And for me it matters very much. It matters to me that I love women and not human beings in general. It matters to me that I spent most of my life not seeing myself and the things that matter to me reflected in the culture around me or in the history and literature that I loved. I feel it like the weight of a vast debt. Like an empty hole in the world that pulls on my soul like a gravity well. In a couple generations, perhaps we will have moved far enough from that well that the effects will barely be felt. But I still feel wisps of my soul being pulled off and sucked down into that abyss every time I open a book that fails to reflect my experience.
I still straddle that gap: between an era that denied and erased my existence and one that seems to aspire to deny and erase my difference. It is, perhaps, a worthy aspiration. I’m not sure. (I’m reminded of the time I attempted to explain to someone why members of Deaf culture could be deeply unsettled by an emphasis on “curing deafness”. I’m not going to go further with that analogy here. If you see the parallel, good; if you don’t, it would derail my point.)
In straddling that gap, I’m all too reminded of how different my life would have been in I’d been born a decade earlier...a generation...a century...a millennium. I want to explore the ways of being that would have been possible for me in a previous age. I want to figure out who and what I might have been in those spaces. I need to “Occupy History”, in the idiom of modern social politics, and stake a claim for me and mine in that vast territory that tried to erase us. And, for me, that “vast territory” includes the imaginative fantasy worlds that I have loved all my life despite their blithe assumption of my non-existence.
I sometimes feel like part of a lost generation in terms of literature. By the time it became possible to write the stories I hungered for, those stories were considered too tame, too traditional, insufficiently transgressive. But that vast literary debt still stands unpaid. I write in history, and in historic fantasy, because I want to help to fill that abyss with enough stories to content it, such that it no longer hungers for my soul.
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no subject
Date: 2014-09-18 06:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-09-19 02:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-09-19 06:08 am (UTC)Oh, very well put.
no subject
Date: 2014-09-19 03:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-09-19 07:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-09-19 09:22 pm (UTC)I'm not looking so much for "positive" bits of history as for the wide array of simple truths to counter the myths and stereotypes. Or at least so we can recognize pernicious tropes and stereotypes in history and look behind and beneath them. The essay I link to at the top of each article gives a better picture of what I'm trying to do.
Doing both
Date: 2014-09-19 09:38 pm (UTC)Having written that one already, my next book will be my angry book--set in the 1970s when many gay people had to be invisible for their own safety. We need to write these stories, not only to honor our own past, but because the straight world has NO IDEA!
Catherine M. Wilson
Shield Maiden Press
no subject
Date: 2014-09-20 06:05 am (UTC)Also - I have a distrust of utopias, even ones that are supposed to function as such.
no subject
Date: 2014-09-20 04:19 pm (UTC)Now that I'm not in a boat in the middle of the bay ...
Date: 2014-09-23 04:34 am (UTC)Thank you again for taking the time to engage me in conversation rather than just stewing about your reactions. (And because I’m aware you’ve been traveling extensively, I’m happy to be patient should you be interested in continuing the conversation.)
1. I used the word “utopia” in the heading as a shorthand, since it would have been impractical to list out all the various genres I discuss. I certainly wouldn’t put contemporary realistic novels in the category of utopia and they’re the most prominent category that I’m not interested in writing. There was no intention to link that single word with all the various genres I don’t write.
Since I didn’t use the word at all in the body of the essay I’m not sure what I said that implied a specific reference to fictions portraying future equality. I think I used the phrase “lesbian utopias” in one of my tweets linking to the blog, but there I had in mind the classic “lesbian utopia” genre along the lines of, “Hey, if suddenly all the men just ceased to exist, we’d all be lesbians and everything would be hunky-dory.” I can see the usefulness as a thought-experiment, but the results (as is common with utopias) always seemed to reflect some rather disturbing presuppositions. And for the reasons discussed in my blog, that particular thought-experiment doesn’t push my writer buttons.
(part 2)
Date: 2014-09-23 04:35 am (UTC)I was setting that extremist position at the other end of the continuum to the eliminationist one. I’m not speaking of a world where genderqueer is normal, I’m speaking of one where it’s obligatory. I hope we can agree that a completely homogenized world isn’t one we’d enjoy much. It’s an irrational emotional reaction on my part, to be sure. But having encountered people with homogenist (is that even a word?) positions, it tends to hold a salient position in my mind of one possible pole of thinking.
(part 3a)
Date: 2014-09-23 04:36 am (UTC)That particular tweet was intended to poke a sharp stick at the notion that a categorical division between “straight fiction” and “LGBTQ fiction” has any objective validity in the first place. Oh, it has a pragmatic usefulness, given the way the world is at the moment. And it can be useful as a marketing strategy to avoid getting utterly lost in the sea of fiction that assumes a straight readership. But in terms of category theory, there’s a problem with the idea that the diverse and overlapping continuum indicated by “LGBTQ fiction” forms a “natural” set. It would be sort of like juxtaposing “California fiction” and “the other 49 states and the rest of the world fiction”.
At the level of specific instantiation, these category labels only make sense if one sets up “straight fiction” (or “California fiction”) as the central prototype and then defines a binary contrast with “everything else”. Well, I reject the idea of accepting “straight fiction” as a central prototype. (I’m not saying that it isn’t an apt description of how the current state of the market is organized -- only that I don’t care to cede victory to that particular framing without protest.) But -- looking at my rather silly parallel -- there is a context in which “California fiction” and “the other 49 states and the rest of the world fiction” would make sense as a functional division. If one abstracts one layer deeper and views it as “fiction related to a specific salient territory” and “fiction not related to that specific salient territory” then, for example, one might imagine a literature course in a Californian school spending one term on Californian fiction and the second term on “everything else”. But it would make no sense for a school in, say, France to organize a study program that way.
If one abstracts contrasting categories of “fiction primarily focused on characteristics the reader identifies with” and “fiction primarily focused on characteristics the reader does not identify with”, then a division into “straight fiction” and “LGTBQ fiction” could make logical, functional sense -- but only from the point of view of someone who identified as straight and not as any of the other components in “LGBTQ” (for which, please assume the other extended versions in use). So once again, from my individual point of view, I would reject this particular categorical division because even in this more generous interpretation it assumes a straight point of view.
However if I instantiate the abstraction “fiction primarily focused on characteristics the reader identifies with” and “fiction primarily focused on characteristics the reader does not identify with” for myself, then it resolves into L fiction and SGBTQ fiction because of how I, as a specific individual, identify within that range of identity options. Someone else might instantiate it as “GQ fiction” versus “SBLT fiction”, you, as you note, might view the literary field as falling into “BTQ fiction” and a different set of “fiction not related to a relevant identity”. The underlying point being that we all, as readers, bring ourselves to the text and interact with it uniquely. Yes, dividing all of fiction into L-fiction and SGTBQ-fiction is absurd, but no more absurd than S-Fiction versus LGBTQ-fiction. That was the whole point.
And if I’m reading your comments correctly, we seem to be in agreement on that. I can appreciate what part of that brief aphorism sparked your reaction. But I don’t feel that my identifying as lesbian and therefore having a particular personal interest in fiction with lesbians in it should be taken as an attack on anyone else. (I accept that it has been, but I find the reaction confusing.) I get the sense that you’re making certain assumptions about my opinions and attitudes based on my self-identification, perhaps based on interactions you’ve had with specific other people who identified as lesbian. I’m sure that there are many points of opinion where we would fail to agree, but I’d prefer that they be on opinions I actually hold, and not on ones where I’m being assigned opinions that belong to other people.
(part 3b)
Date: 2014-09-23 04:36 am (UTC)(part 4 & 5)
Date: 2014-09-23 04:38 am (UTC)5. I would hope you will consider the possibility that one of the reasons you’re finding it hard to understand is because that wasn’t what I was trying to say in the first place.
Sorry this is so long. I thought it might be more useful to be long-winded than to make assumptions about what points could be taken for granted.