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Saturday, February 12, 2011

Writing across differences

At what point does writing about characters who are different from you turn into an appropriation of a "foreign" (to you) gender, race, ethnicity, culture, religion, or sexual orientation?

I'm not entirely sure why, but I've been pondering this question quite a bit lately. If anything, it's probably because I've been realizing the extent to which the characters I spend the most time writing tend to have life experiences fundamentally similar to mine. They are typically girls or women from middle-middle class suburban families; they almost always have siblings, and two working parents; if their religion (or occasional lack thereof) ever impinges upon the plot, it is within a (generally Protestant) Christian context; and whether I'm writing about the here-and-now, or pre-revolutionary France, or a colony planet in the 23rd century, my main characters generally belong to the ethnic/racial identity that dominates their city, state, region, or even country (excepting, of course, the occasional alien).

I'm not saying that there is anything exactly wrong with the fact that I tend to envision protagonists with concerns similar to mine -- as much as I hate the dictum "Write what you know" for the way it gets bandied about indiscriminately, I do feel it's easiest to write characters whose mental landscapes you can connect with. Following this line of thought, when I do introduce characters whose experiences of the world have been different from mine, they're generally characters whose experiences I've been able to extrapolate or understand to a certain extent through those of my friends and family. For example, I don't feel uncomfortable writing about gay or lesbian characters, because even though I may identify as straight, I have a lot of friends who don't, and who've been frank with me about their experiences (not because I've ever asked, as a way of intentionally "doing research," but because we're friends, and things just come up).

But -- and I can't tell whether to blame this on "middle-class guilt," or too much time spent in English classes analyzing the issues of writing across race and gender, or just being a considerate human being -- I sometimes wonder about the larger implications of people from a supposedly "dominant" gender, race, ethnicity, culture, religion, or sexual orientation writing about characters from different backgrounds that are perceived as less socially accepted or empowered. When I portray gay or lesbian characters as main or supporting characters in my stories, am I doing my part to vindicate the fundamental humanity of a group that has suffered discrimination, or is my portrayal from a position of incomplete experience an appropriation of a subject position I have never personally held? Do some stories only belong to those who have lived through them, and if I as an outsider attempt to write those stories, am I merely buying into a notion of my own dominance that allows me to "know" these people even those I'm not one of them?

At the moment, I'm inclined to think that, provided I am knowledgeable and respectful and honest about the characters I'm treating, there is nothing wrong with attempting to write across such differences. In fact, I think that writing -- fiction in particular -- is one of the most extraordinary vehicles we have for promoting an understanding that bridges these differences, and if everyone was restricted to writing only what they knew, it might do more to promote a cultural insulation than to break it down. But the outcry against those who try to write across differences and are perceived as failing is often so strong that I'm never entirely certain, and I'm really interested in what anyone else might have to say about this topic.