neckspike

contemplating a crab's immortality


jesncin
@jesncin

I don't want to come off like I'm bad mouthing another queer author so please don't come in with that assumption. 🙏 this is a purely (brief) critical analysis of a peer's work.

I have a lot of feelings about how modern notions about "Pride" and progress have led to movies, TV shows, and books that aim to shame closeted queer people for not being out. The way new media likes to pretend that bigotry no longer exists, and that the fears and personal reasons queer people stay in the closet are unfounded. The way these stories vilify the closeted as deceitful, and at fault for hurting the feelings of their allies who are apparently entitled to who they are. There's a new (very white) mindset that treats queer stories about queer struggles as archaic, cliche and unnecessary nowadays. "How Modern Queer Media Vilifies the Closeted" I could write a whole essay about it. Maybe I will sometime. But for now, I still like looking back to this one critical review.

Oh yeah the main character of this queer YA graphic novel is Asian too. Not that it informs the intersectionality of her experience in any way acknowledged by the story. Also her mermaid love interest who encourages her to come out is coded as white.

I also have other, harder to articulate feelings about how Ostertag's middle grade series, The Witch Boy portrays a fantasy-indigenous family as having cultural gender roles so limited by binary and tradition that the allegorically-genderqueer main character only has his more open minded queer friend from a public school to relate to. How the second book in the series involves a character who was so traumatized by the rigid expectations of their family's culture that they find relief from that by going to a public school. Just, the optics of that paired with indigenous erasure, the trauma indigenous children historically faced in educational systems, the overall colonial mindset that likes to portray indigenous cultures as having backwards ideas about gender and sexuality. All this written by a white author. And because, of course, society will always gravitate to depictions of QPOC when its filtered through a white lens, this queer middle grade series is the one getting a big animated adaptation.

(quick disclaimer: I think stories about queer cultural trauma are totally valid, I just think that kind of story should come from someone of that culture.)
Yes, I know. The Witch Boy doesn't depict any real, specific indigenous culture. It's a queer allegory. So I'll just lift a quote from game designer and writer James Mendez Hodes:

"If you find a way to scrub an explicit signifier from a racist expression, but keep the expression intact, you preserve the racist dynamic without the explicit identification. It keeps the content the same, but transforms an aggression into a microaggression—which, in polite society, is actually worse than an aggression, because it flies under the radar. Intentional racists get to spam it unchallenged. Unintentional carriers pick it up and repeat it, normalizing and propagating it."

I'm aware that Ostertag has a new book out. That it's in collaboration with a sensitivity reader, Mey Rude, who is not credited in the graphic novel's publicity. But I've been focusing my efforts on supporting QPOC authors and artists directly these days.


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in reply to @jesncin's post:

the piece you've linked is a good critique of girl from the sea, but it also strikes me as being at odds with the assertion that there is something to criticize in the witch boy's fantasy-indigenous family having regressive views on gender. is familial conflict over queerness an appropriate topic for queer white authors to engage with when writing queer protagonists of color, or not? and either way, how concerned should queer creators of color really be with questions of "optics?" is there not a risk of abandoning queer people of color whose experiences of cultural queerphobia are politically inconvenient to the activist goals of the day?

As per my post disclaimer: "I think stories about queer cultural trauma are totally valid, I just think that kind of story should come from someone of that culture." I don't think a white person should write about that because their take will always be more palatable and watered down to the experience. They're also more likely to not be critical of how their whiteness plays into colonial ideas of culture and omit how colonialism informs its complexity.

i caught that! what i'm confused by is its apparent contradiction with the girl from the sea critique. if morgan's story is strange because it doesn't contain queerphobia, then should a white author...include queerness as a struggle, but divorce it from culture somehow? like the piece you've linked seems to say "the book feels hollow because morgan is scared of coming out but then everyone is super accepting," so if morgan's fear of homophobia needs to be more justified, where should that homophobia be coming from?

The author didn't need to make Morgan Kwon, Korean. Trivia; she was actually originally named Morgan Lange to reflect the author's German heritage, but suddenly that changed somewhere in production. Even the original short comic that inspired this graphic novel portrayed her as a red haired white girl. Morgan's Asian identity is non-existent in the story. "where should the homophobia come from?" Literally anywhere else. White people can be racist and homophobic. Ostertag was not forced to write a QPOC character, so why did she change her? I'm not saying QPOC authors will always write perfect things, but that lends itself to inter-community critique and discussion. But when a white author writes about us, it means less opportunities for us to tell our own stories. They're endlessly rewarded for "just trying". If we want true labor justice, we should let stories about QPOC be created by QPOC.

i wasn't aware morgan was originally designed as a white character; ty for the info. i have to assume ostertag made her korean out of a desire to make her story more diverse. i have a surface-level degree of respect for this impulse, but i wouldn't argue that she necessarily did a good job; like i said, i do think villafranca's piece is basically dead-on, and your labor critique is also legit. appreciate you laying this all out!