Friday says, “Beware. I live!”
The UK mass market edition of Libriomancer is out today!
The folks at Del Rey UK have been absolutely lovely to work with, and I continue to be thrilled that one of my series finally has a UK edition.
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Now on to the more aggravating part. I received a very polite email earlier this week from an anthology editor, asking if I was still planning to contribute a story … seeing as how the deadline was March 1.
And there was much swearing on my part. I had committed to this a year ago, and I knew this anthology was on my list of things to write, but I had somehow gotten it in my head that the deadline was later this summer. (I think I managed to mix it up with another deadline for an anthology that has now been cancelled.)
Regardless, the editor was kind enough to give me until the end of this month to get something written and turned in.
Looking back a few days later, it was interesting to see how this screw-up on my part crashed head-on into the Depression. Being a writer is a pretty core part of my identity, and one of the things I pride myself on is making my deadlines. There’s a line in Friends where Joey snaps, “Joey doesn’t share food!”
Well, “Jim doesn’t blow deadlines!”
Between feeling a bit stressed already with the novel-writing schedule and the realization that I’d messed up, my mood for the day went down like a level 2 thief who lost initiative against a Beholder. The fact that I had also gotten stuck on the novel just made it worse. Look — two different sources of writing stress at once! Oh, joy!
The up side is that I recognized what was happening, and I knew — intellectually — that I was overreacting. Not that I’m okay with blowing deadlines, but it wasn’t the end of the world, and the editor was very cool about it. It wasn’t enough to drag myself out of that slump, but I think it kept me from getting as deeply bogged down by it as I would have a few years back.
I’m not asking for comfort here. I know I’m far from the only writer to ever miss a deadline. I know it’s unreasonable and unfair and egotistical to expect perfection from myself when I wouldn’t dream of holding anyone else to that kind of standard. And I know the best thing to do at this point is let it go and start working on the story.
Which, for the most part, I think I’ve been able to do. It took several days, but I sorted out the novel chapter I was stuck on, and I started brainstorming story ideas for the anthology. I added the new deadline to my To Do List in HabitRPG. And I woke up this morning without the ghost of that Beholder following me around, zapping me with its eyestalk-beams of, “OMG I suck!!!”
It’s still hitting me with various minor eyestalk-beams of life stress, but I’ve got the hit points and saving throws to deal with those. And I’m back in a space where I can enjoy the fact that the new edition of my book is coming out, and people are talking about it and saying mostly good things.
A month or so back, I heard about Habit RPG, which is basically a habit-tracking and To Do List app in the form of a role-playing game. You set up your Habits, Dailies, and To Do List, and begin as a level one character. You get treasure and XP for completing items on your list, but you lose treasure and XP if you fail to complete your Dailies.
It’s not for everyone, but for an old gaming geek like me, it’s worked surprisingly well. I only set up two Dailies: writing at least 1000 words, and working on the dishes (a chore I sometimes neglected). I’ve now got a 36-day streak on dishes and 22 days of at least 1000 words. For Habits, which you don’t necessarily have to complete every day, I set up things like Writing At Least 1500+ words, Exercise, and Reading. I’ve added things to the To Do List as they come up, and it works well as a reminder.
Once you advance a few levels, you unlock the drop feature, and can get eggs, potions, and food when you complete a task. The potions are used to hatch the eggs, and the food helps your new pets grow. I’ve got four pets so far, including the lion below. (Yes, I’m wearing a party hat. But only because they didn’t have a fez.) There are quests you can set up, but I haven’t gotten there yet.
I wish you could do a little more customizing. You can set specific days of the week for your Dailies, but you can’t configure it for something like, “Exercise at least three times/week.” Some of the features require you to pay real-world money for gems, which can be redeemed for other goodies, but you can get along fine without those. And the mobile app is rather bare-bones. But none of these are deal-breakers, especially for a free application.
The best part has been getting my son into the game. I set him up with his own character, and we created his lists. Now instead of hounding him to do his various chores, all I have to do is ask if he’s earned his XP for the day. He pulls up his character and starts running around to feed the dogs, take care of recycling, hang up his jacket, and everything else. It’s not perfect, and if we don’t remind him to check, he forgets. He’s gotten down to about 10% of his hit points before, but he hasn’t died yet. (When you die, you lose a level.) But it’s still a lot more fun than it used to be, and he does his chores with a lot less trouble.
My daughter, being a little older and not a geek, wasn’t interested. But it’s definitely helped my son and I get a little more done, and have a little more fun doing it.
I want to once again thank everyone for the guest blog posts last month. They were amazing and powerful and thought-provoking. I know that you got me thinking about things I hadn’t considered before, and judging from the comments, I wasn’t the only one. Here’s the full list of posts:
There were several other posts I wanted to mention in this roundup.
The frustrating thing about blogging is that, for the most part, any given blog post has a very short lifespan. They get their moment in the spotlight, and then wander backstage to the archives. I wanted to find a way to keep these essays alive for anyone who wanted to read and share them. Which is why I spent the weekend sending contracts out to my guest bloggers and a couple of additional individuals for Invisible, an electronic anthology that will collect these essays in a more permanent form. I’m still working out the details, but each contributor will receive a token payment for their essay, with the rest of the profits going to Con or Bust. The essays will remain online for free, but the anthology will be $2.99, which seemed reasonable for a collection of this length. Here’s the cover I’ve been working on. Feedback is very much welcome. The contributor names are pixellated out because I haven’t received all of the contracts back yet. 
I’m excited about this. If all goes well, I’d love to make it an annual thing, both the guest blog posts and the electronic anthology.
In part of her introductory essay on non-binary gender in SF/F, Alex Dally MacFarlane wrote about Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, noting that it has become the, “go-to book for mind-blowing gender in SF, despite being written in 1968. Nothing written in the decades since has got the same traction.” Le Guin herself has written about her choices in that novel, and acknowledged that there are ways in which she fell short of her goal and failed to create a truly agender society.
Bookseller Morgan Dambergs talks about the very few books that acknowledge non-binary gender at all, and reiterates that what they are asking for isn’t to be included in Every Single Story, but simply to be acknowledged, and for the genre “to treat us in stories and in life as regular human beings rather than oddities or jokes or something purely alien.”
I am genderqueer—agender, specifically—and at thirty-one, I have yet to read a novel that features an agender character. I guess that shouldn’t be surprising to me: in the last decade or so, I’ve read more than two hundred science fiction and fantasy books, and only three have included non-binary characters at all. I think that lack of representation has a lot to do with why it took me twenty-one years to find out that non-binary identities exist, and why it’s only been in the last six months that I’ve finally accepted my own genderqueer identity as real and something I’m allowed to express.
When I was nineteen, I read Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. I remember being very interested in the Gethenians, a species of humanoids that spend most of their lives sexless and genderless. But a mild fascination was as far as it ever went for me; there was never any sense of identification. There are two reasons why The Left Hand of Darkness failed to resonate with me. First, when I read the book, I had never yet heard the words “genderqueer” or “non-binary” or even “genderfuck,” or heard of anyone who identified as anything other than binary male or female. I had no lexicon to help me drawn a connection between the genderless Gethenians and my lifelong discomfort at with treated as either purely female or purely male. As far as I knew, there was no human experience comparable to how the Gethenians lived. For example, except during their monthly breeding period called kemmer, Gethenians don’t have any genitalia, so they’re not assigned a gender at birth. Our world, on the other hand, had made it clear that because I was assigned female at birth, I had two options: “stay” female (I didn’t have the word “cisgender” yet either) or “become” a transgender man. Since my biology and society were not and could never be like the Gethenians, the genderlessness of Gethen life never amounted to more than a pleasant thought experiment for me.
My second issue with the book was the human protagonist, Genly Ai. Genly is a cisgender male who finds the genderless Gethenians completely baffling, and spends much of the novel arbitrarily labelling them masculine or feminine to make himself more comfortable. I realize that Le Guin was trying to use Genly’s prejudices to point out the arbitrariness of that kind of labelling. But like the human protagonists in many SF and F stories, Genly is also intended to be the readers’ entry point into Le Guin’s speculative world. His point of view is the one meant to ease us into and explain the stranger aspects of the Gethenians—not least their lack of gender. When you’re a human being who is deeply uncomfortable with the idea of having to choose between being exclusively male or exclusively female, and your first introduction to the idea of a genderless society is from the point of view of a human who can’t wrap his head around how anyone could ever be truly genderless, it’s pretty, well, alienating.
And then there are the other two books I mentioned. The first is Valentine by S. P. Somtow, the second book in one of my favourite horror trilogies. The book’s non-binary character is named PJ Gallagher. He identifies as cisgender male in the first and third books of the trilogy, but becomes temporarily (and mystically) non-binary as part of the plot of Valentine. PJ accepts his transformation gracefully, as do his fellow protagonists, and he’s not treated like a freak. But he does ultimately identify as a cisgender man, not as a non-binary and/or genderqueer person, so there’s little about his experience of non-binariness that matches up with mine. PJ’s non-binariness is fleeting, not a journey and a struggle he’s been going through all his life. Also, PJ is from a half-Shoshone background, and Somtow misappropriates a real non-binary Shoshone identity, called “berdache,” to describe PJ. My understanding is that being berdache is a lifelong identity, not a temporary one. I can only imagine that PJ’s portrayal must be infuriating and hurtful to anyone who identifies as berdache in real life.
The second book is Craig Thompson’s graphic novel Habibi, which is no less problematic. The non-binary characters are based on the Hijra, a real third sex—neither male nor female—that has long existed in parts of the Indian subcontinent and Pakistan. My understanding is that, like Somtow’s misuse of “berdache,” Thompson’s idea of what it means to be Hijra has little to do with the lives of real Hijra people, especially in the modern day.
The Hijra in Habibi take in Zam, an adolescent boy who is one of the book’s two protagonists. Under their care, Zam becomes a eunuch (a practice that is not especially common amongst real-life Hijra) and is taught how to live and work within their communal home. When Zam eventually rejects them and runs away, he talks about feeling disgusted and regretful that he “ruined” his body in trying to become one of them.
It’s hard to put into words just how much that bothered me—and again, the portrayal must be so much more hurtful to anyone who self-identifies as Hijra. I can’t speak as a Hijra; but I can say as an agender person that, although I don’t deny being genderqueer has made my life more difficult, I also don’t regret growing up to be the person I am. I definitely don’t pine for the cisgender woman I could maybe, potentially, have been. And I’ve read nothing that implies the average Hijra feels any less comfortable with their non-binariness than I do with mine. That makes Zam’s arc little more than a twist on the old “gay recruitment” scare story: an innocent young boy becomes trapped in the clutches of the twisted Hijra, who coerce him into becoming one of them—and it ruins his life forever!!! (Yeah, ’cause that’s not horrible or marginalizing or written from a place of extreme cis privilege.)
So let’s recap real quick. Of the three books I’ve read in the last eleven years that include non-binary characters, one features non-binary aliens who are painted as too alien for me to find identifiable; one has a character who self-identifies as cisgender male but becomes non-binary very briefly for a specific, mystical purpose; and the third treats its non-binary characters as manipulative, pathetic and/or self-hating.
Not much to work with, really, is it?
I followed the comments on Alex Dally MacFarlane’s introductory post for her Tor.com series on non-binary characters closely. One of the most frustrating arguments I encountered is that because some SF and F stories featuring non-binary characters have already been written, there’s no need to spend time talking about them. The people making that argument seem to feel that all the books need to do is exist and the people who need them most will find them somehow. But I’ve been in need of those stories for as long as I can remember and have been actively searching for them for close to a decade. So far, with no resources at all to point me in the right direction, The Left Hand of Darkness, Valentine and Habibi are all I’ve managed to turn up.
When I was younger, reading about shy and introverted characters helped me feel like I wasn’t the only shy, introverted person alive in the world, and like those traits were just personality differences, not flaws I had to fix. I have every reason to believe that, if I’d had the chance to read more books about non-binary characters as a teen or young adult, I could have understood and accepted my agender identity many years ago. That’s why the discussion of non-binary genders in the science fiction and fantasy community is so important to me. Drawing attention to—maybe even inspiring authors to write more—SF and F novels that include non-binary characters can potentially change the lives of real non-binary people for the better. We’re not demanding to be included in every single science fiction and fantasy story ever written from now on. But asking the science fiction and fantasy community to acknowledge our existence, to no longer assume the gender binary is the default, to treat us in stories and in life as regular human beings rather than oddities or jokes or something purely alien—I don’t think that’s really so much to ask.
Morgan Dambergs runs a very small used bookstore in their hometown of Halifax, Canada. They spend much (though never enough) of their free time reading and writing speculative fiction. They hope to someday publish some fantasy and horror novels, which will, naturally, include both non-binary and binary characters.
I really appreciate Vic Kelly talking about the difference between lack of representation and poor or lazy representation. As writers, research is important. It’s not enough to just decide a character is in a wheelchair without considering why, or how that affects their day-to-day life. As with so many of these essays, this post has given me a lot to think about as a writer.
Tomorrow, Morgan Dambergs will bring this whole series full circle, talking about non-binary gender and referencing the Alex Dally MacFarlane post that helped bring about this collection of guest posts.
Update, August 2022: Eight years have passed since writing this piece. Vic no longer views Jason Street (Friday Night Lights) as good representation, partially because the actor isn’t a wheelchair user, but mainly because of the leaning into the “my life is over” storyline. Vic is also no longer happy with their description of Joe Swanson as a breath of comedic fresh air. The pinnacle of disabled representation in sci-fi and fantasy is Rosie Lyons in Russell T. Davies’ Years and Years, played by Ruth Madeley, who is herself a wheelchair user and informed the character to a huge degree.
At a very basic level, wheelchair users are not an under-represented group in fiction. We’re just very misunderstood.
Take a moment and I’m sure you’ll easily come up with a dozen characters with wheelchairs: heroes and villains, lead protagonists and supporting characters. They might be from science-fiction or period drama or comedy. You might not be able to think of a character in fantasy—although they do exist—but I’m certain you can come up with a dozen.
I’m going to make a few predictions about your list. Most of the characters are white men. Over half are extremely intelligent. Most of them have vaguely defined injuries. Most of those with clearly defined injuries lost their legs rather than injuring their spine.
My final prediction is that the creative team will only have done some real research if the story is about the disability itself. Otherwise, the wheelchair is at best, descriptive color and at worst, so misunderstood that it might as well not be part of the story.
I’ve been using a wheelchair for almost 16 years, and while friends claim not to see that as one of my defining characteristics, it is. Wheelchair user goes on the list with Irish, gay, ex-pat, hearing impaired, and writer. We are the sum of our experiences and being a wheelchair user is a very different experience to not being one. I am not defined by my disability, but it is part of my daily life and it affects almost everything I do.
Becoming a wheelchair user later in life—or indeed acquiring any condition or disability that drastically changes our interactions with the world—provides a unique perspective on representation. There is a before and after. There is an acquired desire to connect to something that previously was just a plot point or some descriptive color.
In my case, I went from not really thinking about wheelchairs to seeing them everywhere—not to mention seeing the obstacles to their passage. I lost that inattentional blindness that we have about things that don’t affect us. I found myself wanting to know more about my new state, and even needing to find evidence that I hadn’t completely lost my old life, that I still had possibilities.
I gradually realized that very few of the characters I found meant something to me.
There have been some characters that work or at least come close to being good representations. Jason Street (Friday Night Lights) is one. As far as the writing went, Gail Simone’s Barbara Gordon (Birds of Prey) was another, although the art in those comics was rarely as well researched. The Open Hands Initiative’s Bashir Bari (Silver Scorpion) is a character I hope to see again as he was really well done. Finally, as absurd as his physical prowess is, Joe Swanson (Family Guy) is a breath of comedic fresh air.
Despite those few names, some fundamental issues remain. Unless the character’s sole purpose is to tell a story of emotional struggle and physiotherapy (Jason Street) or the disability makes a climactic scene more dramatic (Jake Sully in Avatar), there is a real disconnect between the reality of a wheelchair user and the fictional world.
Many of these issues are subtle but irritating. The wheelchair might not fit the character’s injury and lifestyle. Barbara Gordon has gone through a dozen heavy, thoroughly unsuitable wheelchairs thanks to poor research by artists. The chair might be an absurd contraption. Professor X’s floating metal box in the early 90s and his seated Segway in New X-Men spring to mind. Undefined spinal injuries often lead to inconsistent portrayals of what the character can physically do. Yes, quadriplegics can play sports like wheelchair rugby and go bobsledding, but that doesn’t mean they have full upper body control.
It could be argued that I’m nit-picking but if these characters were supposed to represent people like me, then they failed on some level. The research wasn’t done—or wasn’t complete—and the effect alienated me rather than making me feel understood or included. Some characters fail completely. Professor X, probably the most famous wheelchair-using character, has no traits that show him to have a disability except the wheelchair itself. Even his injury is vague. He’s a better representative for premature alopecia than for spinal cord injury.
The worst insult for me is the sudden cure. The cure negates the character as a representation. Most male comic book characters get cured: they’re cloned into a new body (Professor X); they have costumes that grow new legs for them (Flash Thompson in Venom; Soldier Zero); they get prosthetics that are indistinguishable in function from the real thing (Flash Thompson in Superior Spider-man); or they turn out to have been faking (I won’t spoil that one). Female characters get retconned out of existence (Wendy Harris from Batgirl) or retconned back to health (Barbara Gordon).
That last one particularly stung. While the art had often let the character down, it merely downgraded her from a great representative character to a good one. Gail Simone did some great work, showing in subtle ways that while Barbara Gordon had built a fulfilling life, she faced and overcame daily challenges. Those ranged from keeping her father from worrying about her to being immobilized—but far from helpless—when she was captured and had her wheelchair taken away. She was great. And then she was gone and we were back to pseudo-representatives like Flash Thompson.
Representation is important. When you’re a kid, it’s about having a positive role model with your defining characteristics. When you’re an adult, it’s about being reminded that you fit in somewhere and escaping into that character. And when you’re going through a major life change, it’s about finding solace in stories that show you that someone understands and that maybe you can overcome the challenges you face.
And that’s why representation without understanding hurts as much as not being represented at all.
Vic Kelly (pronouns: they/them) is a nonbinary, white settled Irish, hard-of-hearing, wheelchair-using, panromantic writer and scientist with OCD and cPTSD. They live with their spouse and a bunch of animals in rural Ireland. Vic divides their time between writing fiction, doing scientific communications work, and engaging in LGBTQIA+, disability and mental health activism. They can be found on TikTok, Instagram and Twitter as vic_or_vikki and on the Partner and Ally blog.
Anyone know if there’s a good plugin for emphasizing pull quotes in a blog post? Because I’d love to be able to make lines like this stand out even more:
“That book – that wonderful, hidden, slim brown book – was a lifeline. It gave me the option to consider something other than the horrific status quo I was maintaining.”
Also, my thanks to Joie Young for mentioning xyr frustration with Dumbledore. I had mixed feelings about that revelation as well, but xe articulates it better than I’ve been able to.
I’ve got at least two more guest blog posts coming, but I’m still deciding which one to run next. So I guess you’ll just have to come back tomorrow to find out!
I couldn’t even tell you when I began to notice women. I have no memory of my first crush on a girl. I can look back and identify what would have been a crush if I had thought for a second that I could crush on a female, but I can’t tell you who it was or when it was or even why I crushed on her.
Because that simply wasn’t an option.
What I can tell you is the moment I first saw myself reflected in a book – not that I recognized it was me in that reflection. I was in high school. My literature class was working in the library on some sort of internet search worksheet. I had just completed the worksheet, so I scoured the bookshelves for something to read while the rest of the class completed it. The book I chose was literally on the bottom shelf in the back corner of the library. Honestly, I thought it was part of the reference section at first. The back cover introduced the book as a coming of age novel, and that seemed like a decent enough distraction. So, I went back to my desk and read.
I could not have known what I was getting into. This wasn’t just a coming of age novel. This was a close look at race, education, class, and sexuality. The main characters were black, poor, had insufficient resources at their school, and weren’t of the “traditional” sexualities. Now, I’m pretty lucky in this world. I’m white and middle class with parents who invested in my education from the start. I have so much privilege. But I’m also pan-sexual and non-binary. So, while much of the discussion in this book – oh how I wish I could remember the name of it! – was totally foreign to me, I still needed it in a way I would not be able to describe until years later. When the main character in the book, an aromantic girl, sees the boy she has convinced herself she has a crush on kiss another boy, the moment spoke to me.
The clarity of that moment – both in the book and my recognition of something familiar there – has often occurred to me in the years since. I finally came out when I was twenty-five, a short eighteen months ago, to a few friends. And I was terrified. Because when my family found out, and I wanted them to find out from me, how would they react? The boy in the book was so terrified of being found out. The girl felt so much shame, but she wasn’t sure why. Was it because of what she saw? Or what she felt? Or who he was?
The resolution of the book was the girl working things out in her own head. She re-extended the hand of friendship to the boy, who was relieved that she knew. She realized people were just people and that was nothing to be ashamed of. She became comfortable with her lack of romantic interest. It was an uplifting ending.
And it gave me courage a decade later. Maybe I shouldn’t be so scared (though I was). Maybe I should give people the opportunity to be amazing (and they were). Maybe I should be comfortable with myself (now I am). That book – that wonderful, hidden, slim brown book – was a lifeline. It gave me the option to consider something other than the horrific status quo I was maintaining.
There was another book, Faerie Wars by Herbie Brennan. This one I read about two years before I came out and two years after having fallen in love with a woman (not that I would admit it at the time). It was a revelation. First of all, because it was such a sensory book. The main character is a teenager and the descriptions are focused on concrete senses, especially touch and smell. It was like an adult author finally remembered what it was like to be a teenager – or at least how it was to be a teenager like me.
The second reason the book had such an impact was what was happening in the background. Henry Atherton, the young teenaged protagonist, was trying to understand his parents’ sudden divorce, as was his sister. And the parents were getting divorced because his mother had fallen in love with a woman. The reactions ranged the spectrum. Henry was shocked – his mom had, after all, married his father and had two children with him. Henry’s sister was flat-out in denial and spouting all the stereotypes about it being “a phase” and it not being “real” and how every woman “goes through this sort of thing.” Mr. Atherton was resigned and doing everything he could to keep the family as in tact as possible. He understood his wife no longer loved him and chose to move out. Mrs. Atherton acted as if nothing was wrong, as if she could make it all right by pretending nothing happened.
I haven’t read the book since I came out and began learning about representation (and how not all representation is good). It’s possible that the treatment of the situation is offensive. But at the time, I needed to see those multitudes of reactions. At the time, I needed an idea of what might happen when I came out (not that I would admit I thought I might be coming out in the near future). I needed to know that coming out – after years of silence – was an option. I needed to be told it wouldn’t kill my family or my friends and that there would be people who loved me at the end of that day. And oh, how there were.
Even now, out and happily so, I need those books. I cried when a character in one of my favorite series came out, in canon, as gay (I’m declining to mention the series as the book is barely four months old – I don’t want to spoil anyone). That was my greatest frustration with Dumbledore – we need, I need, canon representation. Those words in black and white have great meaning and hope. Often times, still, books are the support I do not get from the culture that told me for twenty plus years that my sexuality and self were not options.
If those words mean so much to me, I cannot fathom what they mean to those who don’t have all my privileges. Representation in art matters so much. I wouldn’t have known where to begin had I not had it. I would not have known that I had options.
And so, I fight when and how I can for representation. I get angry when people try to deny it. I feel hurt, too personally sometimes, when people say it’s not necessary. I cry when we get small, too tiny pieces of the pop-culture pie because at least there’s a piece for us. Sometimes, I honestly don’t know if those tears are of rage at the smallness or of joy at the existence. Sometimes, I know they’re both. We’ve got such a long way to go, so it’s especially important to me when celebrities and athletes and everyday people come out.
Because someone out there needs the option.
Joie Young is an aspiring author currently knee-deep in the editing process of xyr first manuscript. Xe spends most of xyr time steeped in faerie tales, mythology, and rodeo. Xe writes about writing here, tweets here, and – in general – enjoys being an avid fan of good literature, good TV, and good food. Books were xyr only advocates for many years, so xe is especially passionate about representation in literature.
Welcome back. I’m doubly grateful to Nalini Haynes for this essay, both for writing it, and because it’s a facet of discrimination and stereotyping that I haven’t thought as much about. Thank you, Nalini, for helping to remedy that.
Come back tomorrow for a post by Joie Young.
When I was in primary school, my classmates explained that I was evil because ‘all albinos are evil, look at albinos on TV and in the movies.’ I’ve been looking ever since.
Star Trek Deep Space Nine featured an albino Klingon who murdered defenceless wives and children.
The Da Vinci Code’s villain was an evil, masochistic albino. Every time he self-mutilated, I cringed and died a bit inside.
The pilot of Defiance had two albino-type alien villains, significantly paler than everyone else. Their son was Romeo to another character’s Juliet; ‘Romeo’ had a large tuft of blue hair to differentiate him from his evil albino-type parents.
The Heat’s albino was painted as the villain but [spoiler alert] he was ‘only’ a misogynistic bastard whose unprofessional conduct should have resulted in inter-departmental complaints.
The Hobbit: the Desecration Desolation of Hollywood Smaug features an albino orc. Orcs are so evil that, to make one orc stand out as being super-evil, Peter Jackson made him an albino. I loved the original book; IF ONLY PJ STUCK TO THE STORY.
The Silence of Medair received an honourable mention from the Aurealis Awards judges for its ‘playful’ dealing with racial tropes. I suffered its atrocious prose to discover the judges’ idea of playful dealing with racial tropes was making the villains a race of albino-types.
The evil albino trope is so prevalent that authors trying to be clever create evil (generically bad and/or inappropriately-behaving) albinos who are not the ultimate villain to mislead the audience as in The Heat (movie) and Wolves by Simon Ings. The evil albino trope affects popular perception of and treatment of real-life albinos.
Erin Carpenter said, “A minister’s son told our daughter she was the devil because she had red eyes and that she was going to go to hell.” Because evil albino is the devil.
In 2001 I overheard a conversation between the parents of an albino in grade three and the teacher. The teacher said the albino spent her class breaks in tears hiding in the bushes because her classmates were bullying her. The teacher said the albino had to take responsibility for being bullied, had to stop crying and hiding from the bullies. Because evil albino is always at fault.
In 2005 I landed a job at CNAHS, part of the Department of Health in South Australia. I was refused disability access repeatedly, including in email and in a staff meeting where I was publicly humiliated before walking out in tears. Because evil albino should be refused disability access.
A CNAHS colleague commented she couldn’t read the smallest print on a notice without her glasses. I replied that I couldn’t read anything beyond the largest print on that notice with my glasses. The senior social worker said, “That’s because you’re too vain to wear coke bottle glasses.” The senior social worker repeatedly asked me not to apply for work elsewhere because she needed me, requiring me to work the longest hours and take on the most difficult clients (clients she should have accepted). Then she participated in a selection committee that gave my job to a student she hadn’t allowed to counsel clients only three months earlier. After I lodged a complaint about managers refusing disability access and then replacing me, the senior social worker refused to be a referee, thus ensuring I could never work as a counsellor again. Because evil albino is vain.
CNAHS’s investigator initially committed to natural justice but later refused to include my evidence. After redacting others’ interviews, the investigator falsely claimed I did not have a disability, I had not asked for disability access and I did not need disability access. Because evil albino deserves neither justice nor a job.
The Equal Opportunities Commission investigated. The EOC found that CNAHS refused disability access repeatedly but that this was my fault because I hadn’t asked “enough times.” Because evil albino is always at fault.
I took the matter to court, representing myself (unemployed, remember?). The judge ruled crucial evidence inadmissible; this ‘inadmissible’ evidence included manager’s notes, employment forms and emails proving declaration of disability and refusals of access. When I asked why he was ruling my evidence inadmissible he laughed and said, “Because I can.” Because evil albino should not have evidence.
After losing my career I turned to further study. In 2007 the Human Rights Commission found the University of South Australia discriminated against me. The Human Rights representative presented an offer on behalf of UniSA: $4000 compensation, a gagging order and a permanent ban from further education. Because evil albino is not entitled to an education nor a job.
Once I was allowed to return to study (after threatening to expose UniSA on radio), they harassed and victimised me, forcing me to withdraw. In 2008 UniSA’s lawyer offered me over $3000 compensation with a gagging order and a permanent ban on further education. In the next few years I repeatedly applied to universities to retrain but was continually knocked back until 2012 when RMIT wanted to make me an offer but could not do so because UniSA refused to confirm my previous education. Because evil albino should not be allowed an education.
(I wrote to UniSA threatening legal action then the difficulty was magically resolved although they denied responsibility. I’m now enrolled at RMIT, earning distinctions and high distinctions.)
The evil albino trope is lazy writing, creating a sense of ‘other’ by victimising a small minority group. The evil albino trope alienates albinos, punishing us for looking different and suffering bad eyesight. Reinforcing perceptions of incompetence and evil-ness in this people group is discrimination and victimisation.
Last year I spoke up against the evil albino trope in a cultural misappropriation panel at a convention. Afterwards several people told me that they weren’t misappropriating albinism, they were justified in writing their evil albino.
If you wouldn’t write an ‘evil [insert racial group, sexual orientation or disability group here]’ then do not write an evil albino.
References
Nalini Haynes is a writer and also the editor of Dark Matter Zine. She can be found on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Pinterest, and Google Plus.
Photo by Kevin Mark.
Welcome to the second week of guest blog posts about representation in SF/F. Today’s essay is from Michi Trota, whose photo (at the bottom) is SO MUCH COOLER than any of my author photos. Not that I’m jealous. Nope, not me. Sigh.
There’s a line in this piece that really stuck with me:
Skin color was nothing more than interchangeable window-dressing if we were “all the same underneath,” right?
It resonated with something an artist was talking about this past weekend at the “Diversity in Nerd Culture” panel at No Such Con, about how changing the race of a character like Perry White can be problematic if it changes nothing except skin color, treating race as something that has no effect on who someone is. It was a good panel, and I’m still processing a lot of what I learned.
In the meantime, thank you Michi for sharing her story and kicking off the second round of posts. And tomorrow, Nalini Haynes will be talking about the “evil albino” trope.
Almost all of the women in science fiction/fantasy fandoms that I have felt the strongest affinity for have been white. Partially it’s because there just aren’t many Asian (particularly Pacific Islander) women in supportive (much less leading) roles in the fandoms I grew up with. Most of the TV shows I loved watching as a child had a terminal case of Smurfette Syndrome in which the single girl on the team was white (Voltron, Battle of the Planets, Silverhawks, Starvengers, Starblazers, I’m looking right at you). And when there were characters who were Asian women, they almost universally conformed to some variation of Asian stereotype: the awkward (science/tech) nerd, the ingénue pop star, the Dragon Lady, the grades-obsessed student, and almost always without a love interest (or at least one who reciprocated their feelings).
No one wants to see themselves as a walking cardboard cut-out, but that’s not really the problem with seeing characters who look like you being played as stereotypes. It’s not that I didn’t find anything of myself to relate to in those stereotypes – yes, I played the piano, I was a hyper-competitive honors student, and I even studied kendo for a few years – it’s that many of them felt painfully familiar. Seeing those moments reduced to caricatured facets and bad punchlines that all but screamed “Look how DIFFERENT and EXOTIC these characters are!” made me want to run in the other direction. When you’re the only Asian kid in your neighborhood and get weird looks for bringing chicharrón with spicy vinegar and garlic pork-filled siopao to the annual block party, you really don’t need any more reminders that you’re not like everyone else.
So when I discovered comics, I ignored spunky teenaged, fireworks-spouting Jubliee because I wanted to be like the poised and telepathic/telekinetic (and occasionally cosmically powerful) Jean Grey or the sarcastic, ass-kicking Domino instead. I played Sonya in Mortal Kombat instead of Chun-Li in Streetfighter. Robotech was probably the defining fandom of my childhood, and it had lots women in positions of authority, many of them tough, intelligent, independent and just as likely to do the rescuing as be rescued. But I hated the single Asian girl, the pop star Lynn Minmei. Even though she was one of the most influential characters of the series, I found her shallow, self-absorbed and selfish. It was her romantic rival, the no-nonsense Lisa Hayes, who I empathized with. She was brave, responsible and resourceful, and in the end, she got the guy.
At the time, I didn’t see anything odd about this. I grew up being told that not “seeing color” was the best way to avoid racism. Regardless of the color of their skin, people were not different “inside,” and treating everyone as if they were the same meant that you were not racist. So if everyone was “the same,” there was no reason I shouldn’t want to be more like Lisa than Minmei, or see myself more in Jean Grey than Jubilee. After all, Psylocke was still the same person after her mind was switched from her British white woman’s body to that of the Asian assassin, Kwannon. The writers wanted Psylocke to not “look like everyone else,” so why not makeover the white girl into an Asian? Skin color was nothing more than interchangeable window-dressing if we were “all the same underneath,” right?
But if people didn’t really “see” color, why was I the only one getting asked about martial arts and told I spoke English very well? Why did I always have to play Sulu during make-believe Star Trek at recess? If people still treated me differently, maybe it was because I wasn’t acting enough like everyone else or trying hard enough not to see skin color, especially my own.
There’s a passage from David Byunghyun Lee’s powerful essay about growing up Asian in America that encapsulates what I’ve struggled for most of my adult life to articulate about my relationship with racial identity:
“[W]hen [our parents] saw that their children could perform as white, they encouraged it without teaching us or telling us to love our Asian side. And as the line between performing as white and being white blurred, so did the line between thinking white people are better and thinking that being white is better. In hindsight, our biggest mistake was having believed in the line at all.”
Nowhere has the absence of that line become more apparent than in my own writing. Every piece of fiction I’ve ever written has been based around white characters. The short story I wrote about a family dealing with parental loss like mine? All white characters. The aborted fantasy tetralogy I spent years outlining and rewriting the first five chapters for? The main characters were all white, and the setting was another Tolkienesque pseudo-Western Europe. When I Mary Sue’d myself into my fan fiction, I wrote myself as a white girl. Apparently it never once occurred to me to write any Asian characters, much less as protagonists, even when they were supposed to be me.
In my personal essays, there is next to nothing about my experiences as an Asian American, outside the mentions of the Filipino food my mother made. I can easily write thousands of words about what it means to be a woman who loves geeky things and what it was like to be the only woman in my local comic book store every Wednesday. I can write about the shock of recognizing internalized sexism within myself and the embarrassment of realizing cotton candy pink blush is really not my color (simple bronzer, on the other hand…). I don’t have to force myself to acknowledge my relationship with gender.
Writing about my relationship with race, however, is a struggle.
When I write about being Asian, I instinctively move to the emotionally neutral realm of academia and sociological concepts. Writing about my relationship with race is like trying to talk with a distant relative who engenders no discernible feelings. Rebuilding that connection requires peeling away thirty-six years of scar tissue I never knew that I had, and while each layer reveals new depths of understanding, it also forces me to deal with the consequences of self-alienation.
What does it mean when I say that “I don’t see race?” It means that because I learned to see no difference between “white” and “color,” I have white-washed my own sense of self. It means that I know more about what it is to be a white person than what it is to be Asian, and I am a stranger among both. It means that I built my identity on a warped foundation but never noticed the asymmetry until I not only tried to create new worlds upon it, but began exploring my own as well. In the absence of acknowledging how being Asian is an inescapable part of who I am, I’ve become a cipher to myself.
Navigating the pitfalls and traps of gender stereotypes as a woman has been daunting, but I’ve never lost sight of my internal compass there. Exploring what it means to be an Asian woman, not just in distant terms of abstract social constructs, but in the language of my deepest self, means chasing my own personal white rabbit down the hole. And I have no idea what I’ll find on the other side.
Michi Trota is a writer, speaker, communications manager and community organizer in Chicago, IL. She writes about geek culture & fandom, fire performance and occasionally bacon on her blog, Geek Melange, and is a member of the Chicago Nerd Social Club’s Board of Organizers. In her spare time, she spins fire (sometimes in cosplay) with the fire+bellydance showcase, Raks Geek, and at the Chicago Full Moon Jams (for which she also manages communications and event planning). Her mutant power is making anyone hungry merely by talking about food. Which she does a lot.
Photo by Braden Nesin.
I’m off to New York this afternoon for No Such Convention. Have a good weekend, all!
