Reading about Miles Morales
My partner Doug found this wonderful interview with the creator of the Miles Morales Spiderman. It talks about why he made a mixed-race Spiderman and what superheroes mean to the audience. Some thoughts ...
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"Now, you can't make these decisions [to be more inclusive] consciously, because then you're just writing in reaction to things, and that doesn't work out, dramatically."
That sentence made me think immediately of a couple of times I've done just that, and it has worked *in its context*. E.g.: a humorous song about the calamities that can and do befall a smof - one of the (jokingly self-called) Secret Masters of Fandom, those who volunteer to run fannish conventions, as I did for filk music at Arisia for a number of years. Halfway into it I thought "Hey, wait! Why 'he'?" All I needed to do was change the pronouns, and my hapless Filkmeister became a hapless Filkmeisterin.
I did it because I wanted to be inclusive. I could do it that easily because the narrative was brief and had nothing in any way specific to one sex or gender, or to those aspects of person-ness or society.
That's all.
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I think things like this are important. I also know some songs that have no gender markers, but sound very different if sung by male or female performers; and many more where the markers are just in the pronouns or a few pet names that can easily be swapped, again shifting the effect.
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I remember another writer saying they decided in one work to default to female and only make a character male if there was a reason (with a really low bar for "reason", such as "it makes this scene easier to write because the two people in it will use different pronouns"), and among the feedback was asking if it was set in a matriarchal dystopy, because all the men were gone. What does that say about the usual male-default fare we're offered...
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Creepy.
But then I freaked out the entire population in the Carl Brandon party at Wiscon once: Someone asked what stories we'd written with no white characters. Everyone named one or two stories right off the top of their heads, or in a few cases, several stories. I named one, paused, named another, paused, and kept going like that. And then they were all staring at me. I had to stop and explain that I did not file my stories by character race and had to mentally sort through them all. Apparently that's not what everyone else was doing. Then it came out that their stories with no white people were all "about" race in some way, whereas most of mine were like that because I'd set them in places where there simply weren't any light-skinned people around. I was kind of bothered that nobody else seemed to be doing that. Everyone else was looking at me like I'd grown another head.
I've done the same thing with gender. I've written stories with all guys or all girls or all some other gender, or a mix that leaves out this or that. Some settings are mixed-gender and others are genderspace. It depends on the needs of the story. Once in a while I'll do a story "about" gender but usually I am just writing about people of uncommon genders who are having adventures the same as more typical gendered characters. I have a handful of characters with uncommon gender traits in Polychrome Heroics, but Calvin/Calliope is the only one I can think of for whom that is a primary focus. For the others it's just part of who they are, which may come up occasionally but not all the time.
>> What does that say about the usual male-default fare we're offered... <<
That we're living in a dystopic patriarchal rape culture?
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I don't write nearly enough, but at least the probably best-developed corner of one of my worlds is a country where light-skinned people are a tiny majority, so a lot of stories taking pace there not featuring any of them would be likely.
I'm reminded of comments I've seen on people asking for more inclusive books, that characters of color, or QUILTBAG characters, should only be in a story when them being "that" is important to the plot, otherwise it's just distracting. I just... Damn, I should write up a blog post comparing that with demanding no protagonist may be male, unless the story is about him grappling with the whole male gender role nonsense, such as in Billy Elliot.
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It's okay to say that's the only kind of story they want to read, because taste is personal. It's not okay to say "should only be" because nobody -- not even an editor -- has the right to make declarations for the whole of literature.
>> I just... Damn, I should write up a blog post comparing that with demanding no protagonist may be male, unless the story is about him grappling with the whole male gender role nonsense, such as in Billy Elliot. <<
Go for it. It's time somebody talked about the damage of default. If you write it, let me know and I'll link.
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