On LGBTQ+ Fantasy Fiction & Racist Tropes

Empress of Dorsa Update:

Total words today: 537
Manuscript total: 80,630

Sorry I haven’t posted in a little while! I’ve been a busy busy girl. 🙂

On to the main topic of this post

It started innocently enough. My friend W sent me a tumblr post of some lady warrior photos he thought I would like. He was right; I did. The photos were fun. I thumbed through them.

Then I got to the end, where I read this comment:

White women really need to stop writing fics and making graphics and art about interracial f/f ships in which the visibly brown or black woman in the ship serves as the “knight” or “lionheart” for the white woman who’s portrayed as the “queen” or “princess”. You all are being transparent and gross as hell. For once, consider how lbpq women of color are already painted as angry and brutal. Consider how lbpq women of color aren’t allowed to be soft or vulnerable or sensitive. Consider that they can’t be romantically or sexually autonomous without being fetishized by the male gaze and the white, colonial gaze, especially if they’re trans. Consider that the next time you begin outlining an AU or storyline in which the woman of color is the knight for her white savior princess.

– sapphicwocsource (this comment appears to have been deleted by the tumblr blog owner)

Wooo, ouch. I felt all the things.

Liberal white lady that I am, trying to be progressive and self-aware in a racially charged environment, I quickly spun through pretty much all the various stages of white fragility.

First, even though the words weren’t directed at me, I felt guilty.

Oh dear, I thought. I did exactly that, didn’t I?? Guilty as charged.

Then I felt defensive, going through an array of justifications and excuses.

But I did this part right. And this part of the criticism over here, that doesn’t really apply… does it?

Finally, after discussing it with W (white, male, queer), I sent the screenshot to LT (POC, female, queer) to discuss with her. And let’s be totally honest and transparent about that last move, shall we? LT is my significant other; as such, I tell her everything significant that happens every day (and lots of very insignificant things, too), but I also knew that she would ultimately be supportive and try to exonerate me.

AND because LT is a woman of color herself, I knew her exoneration would ultimately soothe me and help me retreat back into my protective cocoon of liberal white lady privilege.

That last remark is meant to be self-deprecating, btw. Just in case it wasn’t obvious.

Mainstream fantasy has a tendency to be whitewashed (and straight-washed).

On a somewhat tangential but almost related note, I got the funniest one-star review for Soldier of Dorsa recently, in which the review author accused me of ripping off Tolkien. It’s such a silly accusation that I couldn’t even bother to have my feelings hurt. I see very little of Tolkien in my work. If I am guilty of ripping off anyone, it’s clearly George RR Martin! LOL. It reminds me of the reader who compared my work to Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy. Again, I read Sanderson, but I think my work has very little of Sanderson’s influence in it. Mistborn is a very, very different story from the one I’ve been telling.

One of the things I don’t like about Tolkien (and I like Sanderson but I feel like from what I’ve read of his work I see the same problem) is that they create epic fantasy worlds that are almost exclusively white. This is the norm in fantasy / speculative fiction, which has historically been dominated by white men, both in terms of writers and fanbase. In fact, outside Octavia Butler and some more contemporary speculative fiction writers like NK Jemisin, MOST speculative fiction is written by white people and set in white-dominated story universes.

“Interesting” that we authors would invent entirely new universes… only for all the inhabitants to share the same lily white skin color!

In addition to being white-washed, fantasy also tends to be male-washed and straight-washed, for the reasons above that I already mentioned. Part of my goal in writing the Chronicles of Dorsa was to write a novel that was a fantasy first, but also had queer female characters in central roles, specifically to push back against this tendency within the fantasy genre.

So let’s move on to what I think I did right and what I think I did wrong with Joslyn & Tasia.

Emphasis on “think”

The comment about racial tropes written by white women that I quoted above pushed me into some serious self-reflection — and not just reflecting on myself as an author and my motives for writing the characters I write, but also reflecting on myself as a white person living in this race-informed society who’s trying to do the right thing.

First, precisely because fantasy is so white-washed, I wanted Joslyn to be a person of color from go. And I wanted her to be masculine-of-center. I double-othered Joslyn and I did it intentionally, because I wanted her othered by her queerness but also othered by her ethnic background. I was perfectly aware that I was writing a doubly-othered character, because I wanted racism to be a part of her story and the story in general. I did this because I wanted to push back against against all that fantasy that exists within a race vacuum, in which even when there ARE people of color in the universe here and there, issues of race / racism are never part of the story.

In book one, you see Joslyn just quietly gritting her teeth and putting up with the racism that surrounds her. That was deliberate, too, because my understanding of the experience of racism suggests that the quiet gritting of teeth and quiet putting up with things is a common coping mechanism.

Now, I think it’s fair to criticize book one as having an interracial relationship that fetishizes the woman of color and makes her two-dimensional and-or trope-y. I will own that. Part of the reason it comes out that way, however, was the storytelling decision I made early on to use different narrators for each book — Tasia for book one, because it is essentially a story about her coming of age character arc, Joslyn for book two, and, well, I’m not telling for book three. Let’s just say book three has a few POV characters. 😀

The result of writing book one from Tasia’s perspective, though, is that Joslyn lacks a strong “voice” in that book and the reader can only really digest her through Tasia’s eyes — which, of course, is a white lens that occupies a position of social, economic, and racial privilege over Joslyn.

Oops.

In my own mind, I always planned on bringing Joslyn to the fore and flipping the lens around so that readers got to be a part of her interior life in subsequent books, so the fact that we didn’t know much about her in book one didn’t bother me at the time.

In retrospect, my storytelling decision made the book much more trope-y. It put Tasia front and center as the dominant character — the white princess with the strong-but-silent WOC protecting “knight.”

Now to add some context.

I’ve mentioned before how the Chronicles of Dorsa was birthed on a tennis court the summer I binge-watched Game of Thrones. I was chatting with LT on the phone, talking about the “bury your gays” trope in Game of Thrones, which morphed into a conversation about whether or not there would be an audience for a “Game of Thrones with lesbians,” which then morphed again into

(okay, this part is a little private and a little embarrassing but)

a conversation about LT as a princess whom I would gladly serve as her protecting “knight.”

Yes, people: The original Tasia was LT. The original Joslyn was… well, me.

Except LT is far less spoiled and bratty than Tasia, and I’m way nerdier and not nearly as good with a sword as Joslyn.

(nervous chuckling)

Part of the reason I double-othered Joslyn has to do with my own sense of otherness and the discrepancies between LT and me. I don’t want to breech my privacy or LT’s too much, but maybe I can just put it this way:

When I first came into LT’s world, a working class kid from the rural deep South suddenly thrust into the glitzy, ritzy SoCal suburb where I live now… well, my sense of being a fish out of water mapped quite well onto Joslyn’s experience of being a commoner from a disparaged ethnic background who suddenly found herself in the palace.

Just to be clear, I’m not trying to put my sense of other-ness as a butch dyke on par with the other-ness of being a person of color. I’m only saying that between Tasia and Joslyn, I’ve always empathized more with Joslyn’s experience. Even though racism isn’t something I’ve had to put up with, subtle and not-so-subtle forms of discrimination IS something I’ve always lived with, which means I can appreciate Joslyn’s experience in ways that I don’t appreciate Tasia’s.

Enter white supremacy and the colonial gaze.

But here’s something interesting I did without conscious thought of doing it. When it comes to gender roles and race, I flip-flopped LT and me in the fictional rendition of our relationship. In our real-life relationship, LT is the woman of color more likely to be fetishized, exoticized, and othered on the basis of race. She also generally enjoys more economic privilege than I do. But when I fictionalized our relationship into Tasia and Joslyn, the femme princess character suddenly became white. The butch warrior character became brown.

Why did I do that?

I could give you a well-considered justification here, but the honest truth is that I didn’t even think about it — and that’s what’s scary about existing within a culture totally saturated with white supremacy and the colonial gaze. Without forethought, I created an economically and politically dominant culture that was essentially Western European, and I made the culture that was looked down upon was basically Middle Eastern / near Eastern.

I recreated the colonialism and the subjugation of non-white cultures by a dominant white culture, and I did it unconsciously.

In my head, I wasn’t thinking of, for example, Western Europeans wiping out Native Americans, or the British Empire moving into India and Pakistan and claiming it for their own, or the French colonizing Vietnam.

What I was actually thinking about was the Roman Empire, who, during the Bronze and Iron Ages, were so much more efficiently organized and technologically advanced than their neighbors that they ended up putting most of Western Europe and parts of Africa and the Middle East under their rule. E Plurubus Unum.

But — look at this, fellow white people — even using the Roman Empire as the reference point is an extraordinarily Western view! Consider, for example, that ancient China, the early Middle Ages Mongolians, and the Persians all had empires that were larger and, in some ways, more sophisticated than the Romans, but in our Western paradigm-dominated education system, we only see those other ancient powerhouses through the lens of how it affected the development of Europe!

Le sigh.

(By the way, some of the colonialism gets worse in book 3, in which it becomes extraordinarily obvious that the Empire is trying to wipe out an indigenous population. It’s problematic, but at least it’s intentionally problematic. Nonetheless, it does make it hard to root for the Empire sometimes.)

Honestly, you kinda can’t win.

When I was talking to LT about all of this on the phone today, trying to think through the problematic racial power dynamics of Tasia and Joslyn, and the fact that I’d switched character colors so that the princess became white and the guard became brown without even thinking about it, she asked:

“So would it have been better for the princess to be a woman of color and the guard to be white? Because then you’d have a white savior character, which might be even more problematic.”

LT’s right (she likes to remind me that she always is). Since Tasia is allllllmost (but I’d argue not really) a damsel in distress, if she were to be a brown damsel in distress protected/saved by a white warrior, isn’t that just playing into a different kind of racial trope?

And furthermore, if I had made the dominant culture in my books (the Empire) a culture that was all people of color, well, then wouldn’t I get accused of yet something else a white author shouldn’t really be doing with brown characters? Personally, to me it would have felt “gimmicky” or obsequious as a white author to write an all-brown world.

And if you end up inevitably doing dumb white person things by including any characters of color in your fiction no matter how thoughtful you are about it, does that mean the alternative is to only write white characters?? Or likewise, does it mean you shouldn’t ever write interracial relationships?

That doesn’t seem like a viable solution.

Le sigh again.

I think I should be more like Dolly Parton.

My friend S talked me into listening to this podcast by the makers of RadioLab that was all about Dolly Parton. Dolly Parton, in case you didn’t know, is a badass.

In one of the episodes, they were talking about how Dolly Parton used to have an event at Dollywood called the Dixie Stampede, which was a “playful” recreation of the American Civil War (in quotes because I don’t understand how it could ever be that playful).

A black journalist who is a Dolly fan went to the Dixie Stampede and wrote a long essay about how problematic the whole thing was. Dolly saw that article and dropped the word Dixie and reworked the whole event to be… if not perfect, then at least less problematic.

Dolly didn’t make a fuss about the change. She ignored the critics who said she was pandering to political correctness. And to those who accused her for doing it for business purposes, she said simply,

“Of course one of the reasons I did it was for business purposes. I am a businesswoman.”

No B.S. No white fragility of defensiveness or guilt. She explained to the reporter that she is of a certain generation and was raised in the Tennessee hills, and as such she was ignorant of how the word “Dixie” would offend some of her audience.

And by the way, I think that’s very fair. When white people put their feet in their mouths, nine times out of ten they do it out of ignorance, not malice. (Well, with Trump in power it might be more like seven times out of ten these days, but you get the point.) We can only be where we’re at and we can only grow at the rate we are growing. Being “woke” isn’t something that happens all at once.

Dolly’s world had never exposed her to the point of view that the word “Dixie” and any cartoon-ization of the Civil War carries with it racist connotations. But once she read the article and was exposed to that point of view, she changed.

Just like that.

No drama. No excuses. No pushback. Just change.

At the end of the day, that is what my liberal white lady self would like to embody. When I don’t know better, I don’t know better. When I learn better, I do better. No drama. No guilt. Just self-reflection, followed by change.

I’m not sure how all this will impact how I write fantasy going forward. I suspect I will still make mistakes. I will make mistakes because I am unwilling to write an all-white fantasy universe, which to me is the “worse racism” than making mistakes with POC characters. I am also unwilling to write an all-POC fantasy universe, because that feels completely disingenuous.

That leaves me to bumble along in my story-telling as best I can, making dumb white person mistakes and correcting them as I go.

Bear with me.