Skanky Alien Issues
Oct. 7th, 2010 05:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gryphonseggI have some thoughts tumbling around in my mind about subtextual prejudice in SF/F. The difficulty is, I have some vague sense that they're all related to each other, but I perceive several distinct themes that perhaps ought to be distributed among several different posts. Here's what I've got so far:
First, you've got your obvious prejudice with stereotyping of human characters based on their stated or implied membership in categories that exist IRL. Perpetuating these stereotypes in here-and-now fiction is bad enough, but it especially bothers me in SF/F because I find something especially messed up about a writer being able to imagine FTL travel or telepathic wolves or what it's like to be a ghost but not able to imagine human behavior outside stereotypes that don't even hold up under serious RL scrutiny. Much online discussion about sexism, racism, and other kinds of prejudice in fictional works focuses on this type of problem (possibly because it can cross all genre lines and/or because it may be the most immediately damaging of the different types).
Then there's the problem of the default human. In here-and-now fiction and historical fiction, this manifests in the form of surprisingly homogeneous casts for stories that take place in settings that are/were much more diverse IRL. This can happen in SF/F too, but this genre is also prone to other manifestations specific to the use of settings beyond primary world history. Probably the two most frequently criticized forms of this are All The Humans Are White (the cast includes characters of different species, but the humans are all or nearly all white) and Where The Girls Aren't (the population of humans or another two sex species appears to be at least 75% male, and this is never explained or treated as remarkable). It's possible to have a setting that excludes or under-represents some kinds of people, but it's sadly common for writers to use settings that would not plausibly work that and still exclude or under-represent people who, by all logic, should be there. In the corners of the internet where I hang out, many people notice this.
At the next level, there's the Botched Analogy. I say "at the next level" because the problems I mentioned in the above paragraphs are problems of, at worst, malice or, at best, cluelessness and carelessness. The Botched Analogy happens when an author or showrunner or other Power That Be has good intentions but lacks the wisdom to do them justice. The source creator wants to make a statement about racism or homophobia or some other prejudice that is all too common IRL and thinks the best way to do this is to make an analogy between the RL prejudice and prejudice against some made-up group such as mutants or aliens or (my least favorite) vampires. It becomes a Botched Analogy when the made-up hated group actually does have the negative traits the real hated group is unfairly stereotyped as having. This is why vampires are my least favorite creature to use for this kind of project: they really do have a biological need to hurt people outside their own category. Any extended analogy between vampires and any real oppressed class can't help becoming a Botched Analogy unless they're so far removed from all vampire lore that you might as well call them something else. Generally speaking, vampires work much better as analogues for privileged classes that both depend on and prey upon people farther down the status scale.
When reading science fiction novels, I sometimes notice another problem. I haven't read any discussion of this problem before, although I'm sure someone must be discussing it somewhere. I think of it as The Last Blond On Earth. The author is able to imagine a future in which humanity has undergone so much shifting of political boundaries, migration, and intermarriage between previously disparate groups that almost everyone is multiracial by current standards. That's a step forward. But then there's a step back because almost no one is entirely "white" anymore, and there's some talk about how extremely rare natural blonds have become, and yet somehow one of the oh-so-few blond, blue-eyed, pale-skinned, 100% Northern/Western European people left just happens to be our main protagonist! I don't want to knock any particular book for doing this, but the problem is that it's not just one particular book. It's a pattern.
There's this other thing that goes on with non-human sapient characters. Humans, we are assured, are a diverse species and proud of their diversity. In this world, all humans are equal! The only Others are outside the species, and that's okay because they're aliens or fey or whatever. They're not supposed to be like us. Hold on, examine those Others more closely! Don't some of them seem a little . . . well . . . exactly like the RL stereotype of some RL human group? That alien looks and acts like an anti-Semitic caricature, and when your strong!kickass!heroine's "alpha male" love interest talks trash about that Faerie, I'm not so sure that he doesn't really mean fairy. This isn't the Botched Analogy because the creator(s) didn't intend for the Others to represent or be analogous to a specific human group. Instead, the stereotype that hurts people IRL got removed from humans (good) and placed on some other kind of creature (maybe not good). I mean, it's not as directly hurtful as portraying a kind of person that we know actually exists as if that kind of person could only be a flat stereotype. But there's something unsettling about the deeper implications. It seems to suggest that even people who would otherwise seem to know better like having someone to hang those old stereotypes on just for the sake of it.
Which brings me to the topic that got me thinking along these lines in the first place. One of my most hated tropes in anything is the use of an inherently evil race. Even if the creatures in question are not analogous to any RL group of people, I find the idea of writing an entire species or subspecies or race or ethnic group or genus or anything else as being wholly malevolent with no redeeming qualities to be distasteful. Actually, I don't think "distasteful" is a strong enough word, but I'm reluctant to use the words that more easily come to mind because I think maybe I should save them for examples of racism that directly harm real people. At the same time, I don't think the problem of the evil made-up race is entirely harmless. There's something lurking beneath the surface of it, the idea that there has to be an Evil Other, an eternal Enemy Who Is Not Us, even if it doesn't exist in this world. Specific categories may win their liberation and equality, but I worry that the oppression of someone, regardless of how they're defined, will persist as long as we as a species continue to nurture the underpinnings of belief in beings who are born inherently evil.
First, you've got your obvious prejudice with stereotyping of human characters based on their stated or implied membership in categories that exist IRL. Perpetuating these stereotypes in here-and-now fiction is bad enough, but it especially bothers me in SF/F because I find something especially messed up about a writer being able to imagine FTL travel or telepathic wolves or what it's like to be a ghost but not able to imagine human behavior outside stereotypes that don't even hold up under serious RL scrutiny. Much online discussion about sexism, racism, and other kinds of prejudice in fictional works focuses on this type of problem (possibly because it can cross all genre lines and/or because it may be the most immediately damaging of the different types).
Then there's the problem of the default human. In here-and-now fiction and historical fiction, this manifests in the form of surprisingly homogeneous casts for stories that take place in settings that are/were much more diverse IRL. This can happen in SF/F too, but this genre is also prone to other manifestations specific to the use of settings beyond primary world history. Probably the two most frequently criticized forms of this are All The Humans Are White (the cast includes characters of different species, but the humans are all or nearly all white) and Where The Girls Aren't (the population of humans or another two sex species appears to be at least 75% male, and this is never explained or treated as remarkable). It's possible to have a setting that excludes or under-represents some kinds of people, but it's sadly common for writers to use settings that would not plausibly work that and still exclude or under-represent people who, by all logic, should be there. In the corners of the internet where I hang out, many people notice this.
At the next level, there's the Botched Analogy. I say "at the next level" because the problems I mentioned in the above paragraphs are problems of, at worst, malice or, at best, cluelessness and carelessness. The Botched Analogy happens when an author or showrunner or other Power That Be has good intentions but lacks the wisdom to do them justice. The source creator wants to make a statement about racism or homophobia or some other prejudice that is all too common IRL and thinks the best way to do this is to make an analogy between the RL prejudice and prejudice against some made-up group such as mutants or aliens or (my least favorite) vampires. It becomes a Botched Analogy when the made-up hated group actually does have the negative traits the real hated group is unfairly stereotyped as having. This is why vampires are my least favorite creature to use for this kind of project: they really do have a biological need to hurt people outside their own category. Any extended analogy between vampires and any real oppressed class can't help becoming a Botched Analogy unless they're so far removed from all vampire lore that you might as well call them something else. Generally speaking, vampires work much better as analogues for privileged classes that both depend on and prey upon people farther down the status scale.
When reading science fiction novels, I sometimes notice another problem. I haven't read any discussion of this problem before, although I'm sure someone must be discussing it somewhere. I think of it as The Last Blond On Earth. The author is able to imagine a future in which humanity has undergone so much shifting of political boundaries, migration, and intermarriage between previously disparate groups that almost everyone is multiracial by current standards. That's a step forward. But then there's a step back because almost no one is entirely "white" anymore, and there's some talk about how extremely rare natural blonds have become, and yet somehow one of the oh-so-few blond, blue-eyed, pale-skinned, 100% Northern/Western European people left just happens to be our main protagonist! I don't want to knock any particular book for doing this, but the problem is that it's not just one particular book. It's a pattern.
There's this other thing that goes on with non-human sapient characters. Humans, we are assured, are a diverse species and proud of their diversity. In this world, all humans are equal! The only Others are outside the species, and that's okay because they're aliens or fey or whatever. They're not supposed to be like us. Hold on, examine those Others more closely! Don't some of them seem a little . . . well . . . exactly like the RL stereotype of some RL human group? That alien looks and acts like an anti-Semitic caricature, and when your strong!kickass!heroine's "alpha male" love interest talks trash about that Faerie, I'm not so sure that he doesn't really mean fairy. This isn't the Botched Analogy because the creator(s) didn't intend for the Others to represent or be analogous to a specific human group. Instead, the stereotype that hurts people IRL got removed from humans (good) and placed on some other kind of creature (maybe not good). I mean, it's not as directly hurtful as portraying a kind of person that we know actually exists as if that kind of person could only be a flat stereotype. But there's something unsettling about the deeper implications. It seems to suggest that even people who would otherwise seem to know better like having someone to hang those old stereotypes on just for the sake of it.
Which brings me to the topic that got me thinking along these lines in the first place. One of my most hated tropes in anything is the use of an inherently evil race. Even if the creatures in question are not analogous to any RL group of people, I find the idea of writing an entire species or subspecies or race or ethnic group or genus or anything else as being wholly malevolent with no redeeming qualities to be distasteful. Actually, I don't think "distasteful" is a strong enough word, but I'm reluctant to use the words that more easily come to mind because I think maybe I should save them for examples of racism that directly harm real people. At the same time, I don't think the problem of the evil made-up race is entirely harmless. There's something lurking beneath the surface of it, the idea that there has to be an Evil Other, an eternal Enemy Who Is Not Us, even if it doesn't exist in this world. Specific categories may win their liberation and equality, but I worry that the oppression of someone, regardless of how they're defined, will persist as long as we as a species continue to nurture the underpinnings of belief in beings who are born inherently evil.
