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hrjI've been thinking about this topic for a while, and a thread on Twitter from someone considering a closely similar topic prompted me to make it this week's Random Thursday.
As both a writer and reader of characters with marginalized identities, there's an uncomfortable tension between communicating those identities overtly and prominently, and giving (or getting) the appearance that the story is primarily about those identities, as opposed to being about the story, or the writing, or the world-building, or any of the other things a story can be about.
There's this thing you see sometimes (especially on Twitter where conciseness can take priority over nuance) where someone describes a story with a string of identity-labels that crowd out other details of the story. It's hard to give a specific example without it looking like I'm making fun of the practice, and that's not what I'm trying to do. But these are descriptions along the lines of, "disabled non-binary Jewish alchemist rescues demisexual lesbian princess". Set at the other end of the descriptive scale, you have the practice that I've grumbled about before, where the official blurb for a book fails to give any indication that a character has a marginalized identity that specific subsets of readers may be searching for. For example, the failure of the cover copy for Karen Memory to mention that the title character is a lesbian.
The failure mode of omitting mention of non-default identity characteristics is two-fold. Marginalized readers who are looking for representation have to do vastly more work than "default" readers to identify stories of interest. And the omission gives the impression that these identity characteristics are something to be hidden. Or a "spoiler". Or something that most readers have to be tricked into reading about. (And readers, in turn, sometimes react as if the unmentioned characteristic should have had a content warning.) The first aspect continues to function all the way down, fractally, even once you start specifying marginal identities. At every level, one must choose between treating some characteristic as having an unmarked default (to be either assumed or erased), or hyper-specifying all possible characteristics. The topic came up in Twitter in the context of m/m romance specifying (or not) if one of the protagonists were bi or trans.
The failure mode of featuring the characters' identity characteristics in a story description is also two-fold. It gives the impression that identity is the most important thing about the story (because otherwise you'd foreground the plot, the conflict, the setting, etc.). And it gives the impression that the target readership is only people who share those characteristics. (As opposed to people who would enjoy the plot, the conflict, the setting etc., and would enjoy any characters immersed in them.) Even when describing books in a context where Twitter-style character limits aren't relevant, it's inescapable that we assign significance in proportion to textual space and to the un/markedness of a characteristic.
In one-on-one interactions, one can judge what features of a book it would be useful to highlight to a potential reader in trying to sell it. Depending on the context of a conversation, the unmarked defaults may even shift. (If I'm reccing books on a lesbian facebook group, the assumed defaults are quite different!) But in general-broadcast book descriptions, the choices will privilege and disadvantage readerships differentially. Goodreads rec lists can make up some of the difference on a practical level, but they require work to curate and propagate.
When Daughter of Mystery first came out, I had a standard descriptive pitch that I used, along the lines of "Regency-era lesbian romantic fantasy adventure". Over time, I realized that I was including "lesbian" in the description when talking to random strangers, not because I thought that aspect might click for them, but because I thought it would be a significant factor in whether they followed up on the business card I'd just handed them.
So I dropped it. Because I didn't want to treat it as a content warning. If they followed up on my website, or read a few Amazon reviews, and then decided, "Hmm, not quite my thing," that's ok. But I didn't want to appear like I was apologizing for that element, or signaling "you wouldn't like this unless you're a lesbian," or indicating that the story was purely a category romance where the relationship was the major plot. But that means that I may have failed to connect with some readers who needed that focused invitation; who plugged heterosexual defaults into the unmarked spaces and assumed "not for me."
There isn't a solution. Not as long as unmarked defaults exist and readership interests are unevenly distributed. But there can be awareness.
As both a writer and reader of characters with marginalized identities, there's an uncomfortable tension between communicating those identities overtly and prominently, and giving (or getting) the appearance that the story is primarily about those identities, as opposed to being about the story, or the writing, or the world-building, or any of the other things a story can be about.
There's this thing you see sometimes (especially on Twitter where conciseness can take priority over nuance) where someone describes a story with a string of identity-labels that crowd out other details of the story. It's hard to give a specific example without it looking like I'm making fun of the practice, and that's not what I'm trying to do. But these are descriptions along the lines of, "disabled non-binary Jewish alchemist rescues demisexual lesbian princess". Set at the other end of the descriptive scale, you have the practice that I've grumbled about before, where the official blurb for a book fails to give any indication that a character has a marginalized identity that specific subsets of readers may be searching for. For example, the failure of the cover copy for Karen Memory to mention that the title character is a lesbian.
The failure mode of omitting mention of non-default identity characteristics is two-fold. Marginalized readers who are looking for representation have to do vastly more work than "default" readers to identify stories of interest. And the omission gives the impression that these identity characteristics are something to be hidden. Or a "spoiler". Or something that most readers have to be tricked into reading about. (And readers, in turn, sometimes react as if the unmentioned characteristic should have had a content warning.) The first aspect continues to function all the way down, fractally, even once you start specifying marginal identities. At every level, one must choose between treating some characteristic as having an unmarked default (to be either assumed or erased), or hyper-specifying all possible characteristics. The topic came up in Twitter in the context of m/m romance specifying (or not) if one of the protagonists were bi or trans.
The failure mode of featuring the characters' identity characteristics in a story description is also two-fold. It gives the impression that identity is the most important thing about the story (because otherwise you'd foreground the plot, the conflict, the setting, etc.). And it gives the impression that the target readership is only people who share those characteristics. (As opposed to people who would enjoy the plot, the conflict, the setting etc., and would enjoy any characters immersed in them.) Even when describing books in a context where Twitter-style character limits aren't relevant, it's inescapable that we assign significance in proportion to textual space and to the un/markedness of a characteristic.
In one-on-one interactions, one can judge what features of a book it would be useful to highlight to a potential reader in trying to sell it. Depending on the context of a conversation, the unmarked defaults may even shift. (If I'm reccing books on a lesbian facebook group, the assumed defaults are quite different!) But in general-broadcast book descriptions, the choices will privilege and disadvantage readerships differentially. Goodreads rec lists can make up some of the difference on a practical level, but they require work to curate and propagate.
When Daughter of Mystery first came out, I had a standard descriptive pitch that I used, along the lines of "Regency-era lesbian romantic fantasy adventure". Over time, I realized that I was including "lesbian" in the description when talking to random strangers, not because I thought that aspect might click for them, but because I thought it would be a significant factor in whether they followed up on the business card I'd just handed them.
So I dropped it. Because I didn't want to treat it as a content warning. If they followed up on my website, or read a few Amazon reviews, and then decided, "Hmm, not quite my thing," that's ok. But I didn't want to appear like I was apologizing for that element, or signaling "you wouldn't like this unless you're a lesbian," or indicating that the story was purely a category romance where the relationship was the major plot. But that means that I may have failed to connect with some readers who needed that focused invitation; who plugged heterosexual defaults into the unmarked spaces and assumed "not for me."
There isn't a solution. Not as long as unmarked defaults exist and readership interests are unevenly distributed. But there can be awareness.
