Blerf

Feb. 22nd, 2013 01:35 am
yukie: (Default)
Okay, just to clarify...

If an author pulls any of the following shit over and over and fucking over again, I am highly unlikely to like them or any of their work.

1) Gross dumbass gender bullshit--be it taming-the-ice-queen or lady-is-a-prize or vomitworthy essentialist crud or fucky double standards or punishing someone for ~not knowing their place~ etc.
2) Normalization of abusive behaviour/victim blaming--be it that 'boys will be boys' fuckery that basically insults everybody male ever, that 'oh but they're just STRESSED' backhand crap, passing off emotional manipulation as normal etc.
3) Dunderfuck anti-LGBTQ etc. bullshit, no matter what the fuck it is.
4) More-equal-than-others shit where it's okay for the hero to be a dickyacht just because s/he's the hero and therefore any sketchy shit s/he pulls is handwaved or excused.
5) Unexamined clueless shitbrained attempted parallels to real-life situations, without any examination of the hangups that can make this go horrifically wrong and/or make this get ragingly offensive.
6) Stereotypical fuckery relating to ethnicity and culture. This encompasses the 'this one person represents their entire culture teeheez' shit, model-minority issues, and often crosses over with the humans-are-white crap that is so very very tiresome.
7) Ableist shit. This encompasses just about anything you can think of lol--the PWD naturally being evil, evil albinos amg zamg, the idea that illness or disability is a just punishment for something (see also: the idea of ~generational curses~) or that a disability is an outward manifestation of inner badness, and the usual cackhanded treatment of mental illness and of issues relating to addiction.

No, I cannot ~*just look past this*~. The older I get, the more and more it leaps out at me. And? I was taught to hunt this kind of thing down in my own work (my advertising prof was very big on not repeating past grossness) and burninate it with vigour--repeatedly if necessary. I can't help but see it now. And to see it so often in the work of quote-unquote professionals, and see it go unexamined, and see it perpetuated by people...well, that gives me rabies XD

And now you know why I skim most WoW novels and refuse to use certain authors' characters and make up my own instead, and why a lot of mainstream popular media makes me want to bite things. ;p Whee!

And! Yes! I know everyone has ingrained issues and such, because Society Is Deeply Hosey And Issueladen and we all pick up nonsense without realizing it much like socks picking up lint. The key here is whether or not you're onto yourself and examining why you did XYZ Thing. I screw up a lot, I am no paragon, but I do take the time to consider what the heck I am doing and why. The authors I get annoyed with very obviously skip this step and think everything is just hunky-dory wall-to-wall and it's ~just~ a book or a comic or something.

Well. I do not agree with that assessment. Intent isn't magical, if you elbow someone by accident it still hurts etc. Summing up--I'm gonna quote my prof here: it's rare that a piece of media is 'just' a piece of media. Everything comes from somewhere.
yukie: (Default)
I've been meaning to write this for a while but I never ended up doing so because I kept flaking out. But - yeah, it's gnawing my mind.

So.

Before I start, I want to link a couple things. Thing One is Derailing for Dummies, which is a gloriously sarcastic examination of the kind of condescending stuff that privileged people who have no idea will spout off to - oh, anyone in a minority group. I'm also going to link to its deeply awesome predecessor. Finally, I'm going to link to this article, which discusses markedess/unmarkedness, concepts I'm going to touch on when I get going. Most of these resources deal with discrimination based on ethnicity, which is NOT exactly the same as the discrimination I am discussing - but it's born of the same flawed societal baggage. Intersectionality!

What I'm going to be on about is depiction of people with disabilities (PWD), and why this can seem risky. It's really not, BUT you have to slow down a bit and consider what your work might be saying, whether accidentally or not.

and more... )

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