It is a good day to essay.

[commodorified]

I wish to thank legionseagle and staranise for invaluable listening and critique while I was writing this. It should never be assumed that their assistance means their agreement with my conclusions, nor that I speak for them in any fashion, nor that they necessarily agree or disagree with one another. All errors and idiocies stem from my very own personal inadequacies, and I look forward to having them addressed. Also I wish to apologise for asking them to do work on this and then sitting on it for ages. I appreciate the indulgence.

I am also, as always, grateful to fairestcat who fixes my coding and my spelling and my punctuation and whose perspective informs pretty much everything I do, particularly when it comes to fandom.

I also want to acknowledge the fans and the academics I have learned from who were not consciously with me as I wrote this. This thing we do is always a communal production, and I've been reading, writing, and talking about these things for many many years now, the last fifteen of them as an active member of fandom. If you recognise your uncredited thoughts or influences here, or those of another, please let me know, with links if you wish, and I will find a way to credit you.

Permission to link/quote: granted. Anon comments are screened on dw, off on lj. Journal rules as laid out in my profiles will be applied here. Anon will not be unscreened unless signed in some fashion allowing me and readers to tell anons apart. Initials and nicks and so forth are just fine and need not be the one you normally use, nor known to me.

So one of the things we do in fandom is talk about writing about rape.



This essay was originally inspired by this post, but a) I sat on it for awhile and b) this isn't, except in one important detail — the quite possibly unconscious assumption saturating that advice that nobody who writes fiction and/or fic has ever been raped, or gone in fear of it, and all that implies about said advice — a particularly terrible example. There's some very good stuff there, if applied cautiously. So I want to acknowledge Swan Tower, as well.

This is my assumption: we all live in rape culture, and we are all injured by it. Victims of sexual assaults - all ages and genders - are injured by it. Those who have at one time or another been threatened with sexual assault and evaded it are injured by it. Women, queer men, transfolk, and others at high risk of sexual assault, who must learn how to negotiate the world under threat, are injured by it.

And yes, although we will not be prioritising their experiences at this particular time, men socialised under rape culture who are not themselves either perpetrators or victims nor at particular risk are still injured by it. They, as the rest of us, are not the people they would otherwise be.

There is no objective perspective. There are only less- and more- experienced and instructed perspectives.

When a friend of mine was doing ethnographic research on Paganism in Canada awhile back, the one-in-four statistic (Canada, women, not broken down by race or trans status) on sexual assault¹ came up a lot, mostly in the grim-humour way. "Where are the other three?" we kept asking. None of the other three were in the room. Very few of them were in the survey responses.

She also had to rewrite the question about "was your upbringing typical?", early on, to account for the large number of answers that were something like "One of my parents hit me and the other one drank too much after the injury, so, yeah, pretty typical."

I am not aware of any such ethnography of what I will describe for now as "the socially-aware fic-writing and other transformative works-making and reading/viewing corner of media fandom", hereafter "fandom", also "you people who I gladly call my people", but my artisanal data anecdotal impressions suggest that we're in much the same position, probably for the same reason we wound up positing for paganism: because something(s) in this type of fandom is/are valuable to survivors.

That is not a general endorsement of either community as safe, comfortable spaces, by the way: they contain some safe spaces, because we build, maintain, and rebuild them. Some of them last longer than others, but fandom, as with paganism, as a whole is big and porous and complex and variously safe and unsafe. For one thing, large groups of survivors tend to attract predators, saviours, and voyeurs. For another, trauma does not actually build character. It doesn't make you a stronger, kinder, wiser, braver, more interesting person. It doesn't even give you some kind of profound insight into your own particular trauma that you can then generalise onto others with similar experiences.

That only works in fiction - and I'm not necessarily condeming it in fiction, just noting that it is, depending on execution, usually either a cheap trick to give a character a bloody backstory, or a fantasy of agency.

In real life, what doesn't kill you frequently leaves you bruised, bewildered, angry, mentally shredded, and so acutely aware of how much feeling powerless hurts that you're ready to savage the next person who looks at you crosswise.

Recovery, now, recovery can produce great glories. But so can other things, like having a safe, nourishing, secure environment to grow and learn in in the first place. Assuming that the fruits of recovery somehow make it "worth it", or that the person wouldn't have been just as glorious, or even more so, had they not been hurt? Please do not, and I am not talking about in your art here, do that.

Had I not been assaulted I wouldn't be the person I am now, this is true. I might be head of lighting design at the Stratford Festival, though. I might have taken that internship there, that I got offered that year because right before I was raped I did an amazing job lighting a community production and somebody Important saw and liked my work.

But anyway. I digress. As usual.

What this means in practical terms is this: not only is it quite probable that a fic reader² is a survivor of sexual or non-sexual assault, it is equally probable that the writer, the beta, and the person(s) writing a critical response to the fic are survivors of sexual trauma or other violent trauma. Or both, or many traumas.

Which goes some way towards explaining why these topics are always so damned difficult.

staranise points out that

... back[ing] up and say[ing], "That's your experience and that's valid, but that is NOT the way I do it and if I tried it would go very badly for me," without meaning your way is bad or wrong ... is something survivors, especially ones with early invalidating environments or severe psychological trauma, [often] find incredibly difficult or totally impossible.

Which is one of those things that any community worth having has to grapple with at some point - usually at a lot of points. Because survivors of trauma, in our damage, can hurt each other terribly, and part of recovery is learning how not to do that, and it's very hard, and we're all at different stages.

Add in the Inevitable Outsiders with their Invaluable Objective Opinions who always show up at some point and you're suddenly participating in a three-ring armed-goat rodeo in a hurricane. On an unmarked minefield.

But sometimes - even often - we - some subset of us or another - manage some amazing insights, some incredible breakthroughs and share them around, and make both our community and our communal output better. We do that by writing and drawing and vidding and podficcing what seems true to us and reading and viewing and listening to what seems true to us and discussing it as truthfully as we can in all sorts of places and ways while at the same time recognising that we are vulnerable readers and creators surrounded by vulnerable readers and creators, and choosing - of our own will and experience and using our own understandings - to see each other whole and steadily, and by seeing both the work and the community that makes the work, and by valuing both whether we're praising, critiquing, or arguing.

We get there, in my experience, by making rules for ourselves, not by making rules for other people.

This is not a global defense of No Rules About Anything. I don't think I even need to expand on that, given current events in and adjacent to fandom (this does not need updating. Whenever this is read, current events are probably eventing in such a way as to make this valid, alas.) If we don't make rules for our spaces, and defend those rules, we will cease to have those spaces.

It is absolutely not an argument against criticism, meta, or critique.

It is certainly not an argument against critiquing work by someone who has survived sexual assault or other violence, for three reasons:

First, we don't necessarily know and we shouldn't assume that we get to know. It's not our business. It's great that we have this space where we can talk about this stuff somewhat more freely than we're used to, but nobody should ever have to bleed in public and on cue to defend their right to think or argue or write certain things.

I'm choosing to identify as a survivor as well as a person with some research under my belt — as both experienced and instructed — here, but that's my choice, because I have decided that I'm comfortable with it and it suits my approach.

Secondly, surviving an experience does not give you the ability to portray it perfectly or talk about it in a way that rings true to anyone else. Among the many things being raped did not do for me, it didn't make me a writer. I was one already, and have continued to become a better one since via the usual method, endless bloody practice.

Thirdly, if we say "never critique a survivor’s work because it's their way of coping” we're taking their creative work out of the general stream of art and moving it off to the side, treating it as a psychologically or anthropologically interesting artifact.

I have, on the whole, a problem with this. I have the same problem with this in fandom that I have in the art world in general, where what gets called "art" and goes in a gallery or performance space and what gets labelled "craft" or "cultural artifact" and goes in a museum or documentary has been, rightly, a multi-decade controversy involving questions around gender, race, nationality, and disability status, along with a bunch of other stuff.

I propose to take fannish creativity and creation seriously, on its own terms, and my understanding of those terms is that we have set out to make transformative works and by that we are shorthanding "works of art".

So how do we move past the world of simple ordered lists and clear-cut rules for writing about deeply-felt, difficult stuff without dissolving into constant terror that in telling our own stories we’re Doing it Wrong, or fading away into a relativity so ruthlessly egalitarian it takes away our tools to say what works and what doesn’t? 

We’re not the first people to face this problem, and we can learn from the people who have gone before us. We have, among us, an amazing array of tools. Mine are, mainly, work as a sex educator, as a hopefully intersectional feminist (anything worth doing is worth doing badly, if that's where you have to start), as a peace activist (see previous parentheses) and, on the academic side, the social sciences, primarily anthropology, specifically focussed on women and feminism and religion - which ends up talking about sex a lot, to the shock of exactly nobody.

I am always trying to get people in fandom to read Ruth Behar's The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart, and I'm going to keep trying to get people to read her, because the things she talks about as necessary to anthropology are also, I think, potentially incredibly central and important to fandom.

She talks about vulnerable critique and about art and scholarship that breaks your heart and about being rigorous while being open and soft, and you guys, I think we need these concepts a lot.

At one point, she talks about her experience of getting up on a stage and discussing the incredibly important² anthropological work Grief and a Headhunter's Rage for an audience which included Renato Rosaldo, the author, who she admires greatly, who was the incoming President of the American Ethnographical Society, and who had, not that long ago, suffered a terrible loss:

When Ilongots told me, as they often did, how the rage in bereavement could impel men to headhunt, I brushed aside their one-line accounts as too simple, thin, opaque, implausible, stereotypical, or other-wise unsatisfying. Probably I naively equated grief with sadness. Certainly no personal experience allowed me to imagine the powerful rage Ilongots claimed to find in bereavement. My own inability to conceive the force of anger in grief led me to seek out another level of analysis that could provide a deeper explanation for older men’s desire to headhunt.

Not until some fourteen years after first recording the terse Ilongot statement about grief and a head- hunter’s rage did I begin to grasp its overwhelming force
[...]
In 1981 Michelle Rosaldo and I began field research among the Ifugaos of northern Luzon, Philippines. On October 11 of that year, she was walking along a trail with two Ifugao companions when she lost her footing and fell to her death some 65 feet down a sheer precipice into a swollen river below. Immediately on finding her body I became enraged. How could she abandon me... [Rosaldo, R: Grief and a Headhunter's Rage]

"Later," Behar says, "they will tell me [Rosaldo] sat in the lobby, alone, while I spoke." Behar talks about both complex heartbreak, that her talk was too painful for Rosaldo, who she profoundly admires and desires to please and impress, to hear, and deep compassion for his pain and a desire not to worsen it while still saying what was important and true. This, in itself, I find important to my experience of fandom.

From the talk she gave:

I think what we are seeing is an effort to map an intermediate space we can't quite define yet, a borderline between passion and intellect, analysis and subjectivity ... art and life. Consider, for example, the debate around Bill T. Jones's dance work 'Still/Here' ... sparked by Arlene Croce's ... essay where she announced she had refused to see the work on the grounds that ... dancing inspired by the movements of HIV-positive dancers and video testimony by AIDS patients turned the art of dance into 'victim art'...The anxiety around such work is that it will prove to be beyond criticism, that it will be undiscussible. But the real problem is that we need other forms of criticism ... rigorous yet not disinterested ... not immune to catharsis ... Criticism which can respond vulnerably, in ways we must try to begin to imagine. [Behar, Vulnerable Observer]

Rosaldo's work is profoundly personal and deeply informed by his own pain and loss. At the same time it is a piece of ethnography, an attempt to express an understanding of a people, vulnerable in their turns to misunderstanding and misrepresentation. It matters that he be rigorous and honest and skilled, that he get it right. It matters that his work can be discussed, critiqued, responded to. If Grief and a Headhunter's Rage were a personal essay about Michelle Rosaldo's death and Renato Rosaldo's personal grief and anger, it would be perhaps a good essay, but it would be an abject failure as a piece of ethnography, and perhaps an appropriation of the Ilongot culture.

Only perhaps. Much would depend on execution. There's nothing wrong with using your experience and learning to untangle your own life. There is something wrong when you label that as ethnography.

Fiction, vidding ... the rules are different. The lines are different. There is no ethical prohibition on the act of creating art to express or address one's own inner turmoil — though there is also no law that says you have to do that.

I firmly believe that in declaring that authorial intent to be dead we do accept a certain obligation to leave authorial intent quietly in its grave. We don't get to dig into a writer's experiences and identity and then use our impressions of them to judge the work while ignoring their own expressions of them as irrelevant. Requiring someone to bleed on demand and judging them on the quantity and iron content thereof is not a form of artistic engagement. It's a form of abuse.

I'm not arguing for imposing the rules of anthropological enquiry on art, only hoping to point to the places where the dilemmas are similar, because there's some good stuff there.

So, there's that. At the end of the day, the work is the work, and the work is either the best you can do, or not. And then you put it out there, because sharing our work is part of fannish creativity, it's partly about a conversation between works, and we all have our reasons and our stories but there's the work, and it's good or it isn't, and it's loved or it isn't, and people find truth in it or they don't.

Oh, I know we do this for fun, I know it's a game, I know. But the work doesn't know. Games are most fun, as a rule, when you play them as well and as fully as you can. Fannish writing is a lot of things, but it's still writing. It's not somehow easier than professional fiction-writing. We want to write good stuff, however we define "good", and we want to read good stuff, again, however we define that, and the trauma and the demons and the pain get dragged along for the ride and dressed up in weird costumes and made to serve the purposes of the writing, which is to serve the purposes of the writer and of the reader.

How do we encompass all of that, Behar asks. How do we do - and respond to - work which breaks our hearts?

She doesn't answer the question, and I'm not going to either, because there is no single answer. If I have an argument here it's not "do it my way", but "consider these things and whether they are of value to you in doing it your way."

Fannish creativity, I often think, is about making art that breaks our hearts, and heals them too. I am proposing, here, that we take ourselves seriously: that we go hard and stay soft, both.

Appendix:

So, for those who wish some actual advice:

Here is what I think writers should consider when they find themselves at a point in their story where there is going to be rape. (Note: up to a point, for "rape", read also "abuse". Use your own judgement as to where that point is.)

First, if you are in the common, awful position of already knowing more about rape than anyone anywhere should ever need to:

I will defend your right to deal in the ways and spaces that suit you best, to read and write and draw and say what you want and need to read, write, draw, and say, even if those things will hurt me and I need to stay away from them and I trust you to already care about other survivors and to consider their needs as best you can.

I have no general advice for you on this topic beyond: remember that the experience of trauma is always both general - if this were not so we could never usefully talk about rape survivors or abuse survivors or combat vets as a group - and particular, because people are individual and idiosyncratic and so is each event that happens to them - and believe people when they say their needs and wants and problems are different from yours.

Believe them, without feeling responsible for their needs and wants. Believe them without feeling like you have to then disbelieve yourself. Nobody has to be wrong for you to be right, or bad for you to be good. There is nothing you must write, and nothing you mustn't write, except the thing that you know, yourself, to be bad.

If you are in the fortunate position of not knowing much about the topic, okay, I have SOME advice, which is this:

Don't casually replicate other people's fictional handling. Do your own work, make your own decisions, bring your own understanding to it, because if you copy someone else's product without having their understanding, you are almost certainly going to end up with something dishonest even if the original was good.

To make matters worse, there are a lot of writers out there, in fandom and out, who have been happily copying each other's casual replication of stereotypes for years already, so the odds are that you have read a lot of dishonest garbage and accidentally stashed some of it in your head.

Consult, instead, a decent scattering of NON-fiction on the topic. Prioritise survivor accounts, or readings that survivors visibly approve or commend. Become instructed.

Then proceed as you think best.

1) I'm aware that that statistic lacks nuance. That discussion is not within the scope of this post, and will be ... firmly ... discouraged in comments. It is cited as part of an illustrative anecdote, from a conversation many years back.

2) I have tried to include fanartists, vidders, meta writers, and other fannish creators in this essay where I could, but a) it is primarily about writing and b) if I just use "creators" then I end up stuck with "consumers", too, and - I thank legionseagle for helping me make this connection explicit - the logic of capitalism, that "we deserve good, honest, representative stories" can be freely translated into "writers are obligated to provide us with the narratives we want", has no place in this essay.

3) You should read that, it's a work of literally heartbreaking genius. You should also read some Michelle Rosaldo, because she was an amazing feminist anthropologist and she did some absolutely groundbreaking stuff in the time she had.

Comments

[staranise]

"Do I count?" "Is it over? Good. You've graduated."