What's Making Me Happy: "Queer, Angry, And Not Ashamed"

[raven_cromwell]

The first step to rectifying any lapse or void is to acknowledge that rectification is necessary. This's a problem of ~representation~ that'll seem very. very familiar to those of you who're my tumblr mutuals. It's the ball we've been batting about in private chats for years. And it's finally, slowly, I think, starting to get some traction. At least within genre circles, and eventually, genre translates to wider circulation.

This's just such a good! distillation of so much of the best conversations I've been a part of. And even better, it leads to other conversations, other people's work who we all may wanna follow because it's very likely they'll be doing revolutionary things in the future.

For a taste, have a brief excerpt:

It’s troubling, sometimes, how much the issue of “good representation”—and the arguments around it—slides towards a pervasive sense that creators must depict people who are good and right and do right. It’s not necessarily an explicit dictate, but there’s an unspoken undercurrent, a sense that to portray ugliness, unlikeability, fury—to portray people who have responded to suffering with cruelty and bitterness and rage—is to be complicit in one’s own vilification. And to be vulnerable. Justify your existence is the sea we swim in, always against the current.

To be unmarked by compromise, to be without sharp edges that sometimes cut even when you don’t want them to—because the world is what it is, and sometimes what it is teaches you that the best defence against being hurt by cruelty is a really quick offense—is to either be very young or hardly human. But when we come to fictional portrayals, well… As you know, Bob, Bob gets to be seen as a difficult genius, where Alice is seen as a bitch or a Mary Sue.

Liz is one of my go-to critics, right up there with Amal, and this's the best piece of writing she's produced in a while. Whole thing's well worth a read