Stop oversimplifying social justice
Apr. 18th, 2017 01:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rainwatersparkSort of a spiritual sequel to my last post.
I'm someone who struggles with the tendency to think in black-and-white terms, and yet even I'm tired of the way social justice is often oversimplified on social media.
I saw a Twitter thread about this blog post: "Dear cis gay men, here's why women in MM romance don't listen to you"
Obviously, that post title is pretty inflammatory, and the Twitter thread was blasting the blog author (a bisexual white woman) for writing the post primarily in response to a gay man of color (even though the post also addressed cis gay men as a group).
Here's the thing. White people are absolutely prone to being racist against and talking over people of color. But, men are also prone to being misogynistic towards and talking over women. These are separate oppressions that can coexist at the same time.
I'm personally not comfortable with the blogger's assertion that MM romance *belongs* to women. Yes, MM romance occupies a weird space because it seems to have grown out of women-dominated spaces and female writers, and that's a weird thing to deal with.
I also am ambivalent about her claim that "what gay men want to see in MM romance doesn't matter." If you're writing about a marginalized group, the decent thing to do is to try to accurately reflect their experiences. That being said, the writer does have a point about how sometimes people complain when their specific experience isn't represented, even though their experience isn't necessarily the experience of everyone else within their group. It's a complicated, nuanced issue, basically.
But, to write off the blogger's post completely is to say that her experiences with sexist microaggressions and harassment from gay men are invalid, or don't matter, and that's something I'm not comfortable with, either.
(It's also weird to oversimplify this situation to "white woman whitesplains to a gay man of color" because the blogger does mention other gay men (without referencing their race, but I'd be shocked if all of the gay men she was talking about were men of color, though). There's also another intersection because both of the parties are LGB and the white woman was specifically hurt by the fact that the gay man of color in question called her "straight," invalidating her sexual orientation, which brings in another issue of gay men who have an issue with the MM romance genre often assuming that all female writers of MM romance are straight, even when that's not true.)
It's just frustrating to me because, as a multiply marginalized person, I'm way too used to seeing seemingly progressive social justice that will throw one of my marginalizations under the bus.
Social media social justice needs to be better at intersectionality, less black-and-white thinking, and acknowledging that issues are complicated and sometimes there's no "pure victim" or "pure aggressor," but rather separate oppressions intersecting in different ways.
I'm someone who struggles with the tendency to think in black-and-white terms, and yet even I'm tired of the way social justice is often oversimplified on social media.
I saw a Twitter thread about this blog post: "Dear cis gay men, here's why women in MM romance don't listen to you"
Obviously, that post title is pretty inflammatory, and the Twitter thread was blasting the blog author (a bisexual white woman) for writing the post primarily in response to a gay man of color (even though the post also addressed cis gay men as a group).
Here's the thing. White people are absolutely prone to being racist against and talking over people of color. But, men are also prone to being misogynistic towards and talking over women. These are separate oppressions that can coexist at the same time.
I'm personally not comfortable with the blogger's assertion that MM romance *belongs* to women. Yes, MM romance occupies a weird space because it seems to have grown out of women-dominated spaces and female writers, and that's a weird thing to deal with.
I also am ambivalent about her claim that "what gay men want to see in MM romance doesn't matter." If you're writing about a marginalized group, the decent thing to do is to try to accurately reflect their experiences. That being said, the writer does have a point about how sometimes people complain when their specific experience isn't represented, even though their experience isn't necessarily the experience of everyone else within their group. It's a complicated, nuanced issue, basically.
But, to write off the blogger's post completely is to say that her experiences with sexist microaggressions and harassment from gay men are invalid, or don't matter, and that's something I'm not comfortable with, either.
(It's also weird to oversimplify this situation to "white woman whitesplains to a gay man of color" because the blogger does mention other gay men (without referencing their race, but I'd be shocked if all of the gay men she was talking about were men of color, though). There's also another intersection because both of the parties are LGB and the white woman was specifically hurt by the fact that the gay man of color in question called her "straight," invalidating her sexual orientation, which brings in another issue of gay men who have an issue with the MM romance genre often assuming that all female writers of MM romance are straight, even when that's not true.)
It's just frustrating to me because, as a multiply marginalized person, I'm way too used to seeing seemingly progressive social justice that will throw one of my marginalizations under the bus.
Social media social justice needs to be better at intersectionality, less black-and-white thinking, and acknowledging that issues are complicated and sometimes there's no "pure victim" or "pure aggressor," but rather separate oppressions intersecting in different ways.
