the heart

[hth]

I've been going over some meta stuff from earlier in the month that I only gave a cursory glance to the first time around, and particularly cesperanza's post on identification and "over"-identification with our characters (particularly as writers, but I think the dynamic is as visible with fans whose dominant discourse is criticism, as well as obviously visible with fic writers). I've known Ces for many years now, and I've always appreciated and admired her belief that joy and desire are both central to fannishness and deserve to be central to fannishness, requiring no excuses or outside validation -- but at the same time, I've never managed to become the beautiful hedonist that she is -- I blame my grim, schadenfreudian [tm!] Teutonic DNA. *g* Hence, I argue with her sometimes -- like now!



The original post is here. kassrachel commented:

One of the other things I did, when I was first getting into fandom, was clunkily write Blair as a kind of thinly-veiled Kass. I gave him my tics and my anachronistic phrasings, and I was totally hot for Jim the way he was hot for Jim. My fannishness matured, in a certain way, when I realized I was also hot for Blair when I saw him through Jim's eyes -- that I could inhabit both partners in the pairing, both sides of the dynamic. Not either/or but both/and.

Ces's responding comment was:

No, no, no, no== it's TOTALLY AT THE HEART OF WHAT WE DO!! OMG, was I not ironic enough??? Because--YES, it's what we're "supposed" to be embarrassed about, the idea that we make these guys like us, see ourselves in them, blah blah! But Kass--you know me--but if the choice is between the embarrassment of overidentification and the cold cold hell of distance: dude! Distance kills!

And, I mean, but.... Are those really my only choices?

Isn't there something sort of -- not just childish, but genuinely selfish and reductive, about an unqualified embrace of "identification" as our primary response -- the *heart* of what we do with/for/to these characters? It seems almost stuck in that mindset where people fall into one and only one of two categories: A) OMG, totally just like me!!!, ergo interesting and valuable, and B) not recognizeably like me, ergo invisible or free to be fixed-up until they *do* fit into A. In that way, the race issue isn't the exception to the rule at all -- it's just that these issues that got discussed in the original post in re: identifying up vs. down the power scale from yourself (and it was good stuff; you should go read some of those comment threads) make it so that white writers feel unable to apply the fix-it solution to the problem of B and largely default to the ignore solution.

Isn't there -- can't there be an option C, where we like and write characters *even though* they aren't us? Maybe find them interesting because of their alienness, or even, like Kass was saying, extend ourselves artistically and emotionally to the point where we can feel genuine love for a character not because we've managed to make Blair Sandburg a reflection of us, but just because he's potentially loveable as the person he is? Like, does Sheppard always HAVE to be a secret emo math nerd before we can love him as much as we love Our Own Kind, or can he be an adrenaline junkie where we're couch potatoes, a professional killer while we generally assume we'll never have to take a human life, a sports enthusiast where we're bored sick by sports, a laconic loner when our hobby is going on and on and on about our every thought with our four hundred closest internet friends? *g* If he really, truly is Not Us, can we like him, love him, want him anyway?

This is why I love fiction, you know? I'm not Dean, I'm not Scully, I'm not Fraser, I'm sure as hell not Ronon, not in any way, and I won't ever be any of those people that I'm not, but fiction makes me able to shift my boundaries so that I can temporarily be in their space and outside of my own, and I love that. That's what professional fiction gives me -- I may be betraying my genre roots here, but be that cause or effect, there it is. I love temporarily being the alien, because it gives this shot of multiplicity to my one single life. Hell, my first slash pairing, not only before I knew what slash was, but probably before I reliably knew what *sex* was, was Davidge and Jerry from Enemy Mine (yes, my first interracial OTP was human/lizard. Look, y'all have your kinks and I have mine.) I love the idea that, since all love is a leap into the unknown, the more unknown you can make yourself vulnerable to, the greater your powers of love. I love that as a story and as just a way to make sense out of life (which secretly I believe is a redundant sentence, but that's another topic for another time.)

And I love fandom and fanfiction with all my heart, and I hate to think there's no place for that there, because the type of writing that's always lionized is the type that replicates me endlessly, with a sometimes creepy subtext of "everyone worth your attention is you, or just like you." Which I know isn't Ces's intent, or presumably anyone's, but by placing that homogenizing function of fanfic as the HEART of the fannish experience, doesn't that give pride of place to an A-or-B worldview where people conform or disappear? And even if the worldview being replicated and its concerns aren't the same one that exists in the mainstream (our concerns so frequently include problematized bodies, complications of desire, outsiderness/queerness, all the other stuff that you can't leave fandom and reliably get), it's still at best sort of parochial and at worst inevitably marginalizing for other potential fans, for whom race or class are issues with as much heft as gender, or who simply don't relate to the prevailing romance-novel/rom-com tropes that shippy fic lifts from the middle-class heteronormative perceptions of love.

Comments

Correction to deleted post above

[zvi-likes-tv.livejournal.com]

You have understood the thrust of hth's argument completely differently from what I understood her to be saying. She isn't questioning the type of character which fandom embraces.

I understood her to be questioning the view that the practice of identifying with character is the heart of fannish experience. The question I read was, can we not appreciate our characters, love them, work with them, talk about them, or judge them on a scale which doesn't go from "is like me" to "is not like me"?

Are there not other axes of interaction with the characters that are as valid mediafan practices as the one you're positing as the heart of fannish practice (which I read as Character Sue)?

Re: Correction to deleted post above

[solvent90.livejournal.com]

the practice of identifying with characters

I'm not sure what this means, or whether it means the same thing in the context of cesperanza's post and of hth_the_first's. I read cesperanza's post as defining identification in opposition to objectification, so that "distance" in the quoted passage is the distance which objectifies. So I read 'identifying with character X' as understanding him/her as a subject as opposed to (or as well as?) an object. If that's right, then Hth's Option C doesn't stand in opposition it, I think - it just asks how far we should/could/do extend it to encompass characters who - in some respect - are Not Like Us.

Which. I find the framing of the question confusing - maybe because I'm not clear on what "not like me" means. To some extent, to write a character's point of view I have to deny that they are absolutely Other or Not Like Me - writing Ronon Dex's point of view means asking "what if I were Ronon Dex?" I have to refuse the idea that all Ronon's differences from me make him incomprehensibly different, deny that his otherness makes him genuinely Other. I have to identify with him. The problem, I guess, is taking the opposite approach - "what if Ronon Dex were me?" And then deciding - precisely because I believe that his differences
make him alien, other - that that's too hard and I'm going to write from Rodney's point-of-view instead. If Hth is calling people out for doing the second of those, that makes perfect sense to me; but I'm not sure there's a way around the first. Is there a way of writing a fictional person as a subject without asking "what if I were you"?

Re: Correction to deleted post above

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, there is a way to do that its called "putting oneself in other people's shoes" so yes, you can write a character's POV without actually feeling at all like that person in any way or in any significant way.

Re: Correction to deleted post above

[solvent90.livejournal.com]

Well, I think that's a terminological problem - I might, as Hth pointed out, be misusing the word identification. I was using it to be synonymous with "putting oneself in their shoes".

Re: Correction to deleted post above

[hth-the-first.livejournal.com]

I read cesperanza's post as defining identification in opposition to objectification, so that "distance" in the quoted passage is the distance which objectifies.

But what I'm saying is that I don't think identification *is* a fair opposite to objectification, so when she says, "well, if those are the choices, here's what I pick!" my response is, "but you invented that dichotomy; those aren't The Choices." The opposite of an object is a subject; to avoid objectifying your characters, you have to treat them as *subjects* in their own right, not necessarily as subjects with whom you identify (except in the most cursory way, in that I could probably find points of commonality between myself and any sentient being in the world; there's bound to be *something* we have in common.)

writing Ronon Dex's point of view means asking "what if I were Ronon Dex?" I have to refuse the idea that all Ronon's differences from me make him incomprehensibly different, deny that his otherness makes him genuinely Other.

I don't think that's an unfair or incorrect way to write, but you have to understand, it isn't the way I write. I've never asked myself that. When I sit down to write a story, what I do is build a little backstory around the character so I have a sense of who he is, both in canon and within the confines of this story, and then what I ask is, "What does he want? If I put him in X situation, how would this person respond?" It's usually nothing at all like the way I would respond, which is the source of my interest in the character and the story. I like what you say about refusing the idea that the character is "incomprehensibly different," but what I think identification does is fix that by eliding the "different" (he's not so different from me after all! it just looked that way at first!), whereas I'm sticking up for the value of fixing that by eliding the "incomprehensible" (I can see his point of view even when it's not my own! I am up to this task!)

The problem, I guess, is taking the opposite approach - "what if Ronon Dex were me?" And then deciding - precisely because I believe that his differences make him alien, other - that that's too hard and I'm going to write from Rodney's point-of-view instead.

That's exactly the problem that concerns me, only unfortunately I don't find the line between "what if I were him?" and "what if he were me?" as clear as you do -- that one of them is safe and one is dangerous. I think they're pretty similar statements, and whatever temptations and dangers lurk in one, necessarily lurk in the other, too -- the temptation to begin dismissing or ignoring characters who seem too hard to do that for.

From some of the other comments in the main post, it seems like Ces is making a case that "identify" means exactly the same thing as "empathize" -- and if that's how we want to apply language, I agree with her. My thing is, those words really do have two separate meanings, and I think it's unfair, confusing, and unnecessary to crush them together so we can interchange them at will. My dictionary even has a little usage note that says "Identify is well established in the sense, popularized by psychology, of "to see oneself as one with." A majority of the Usage Panel accepts this example: He identified himself with the hero of a new novel." It's important to me to suggest that you really can empathize with someone you don't see yourself as one with -- because people really aren't all the same, and if we wait until we see ourselves mirrored in everyone around us, when will we ever start practicing empathy for others? Hence my strong feelings about not conflating those two words.

Re: Correction to deleted post above

[solvent90.livejournal.com]

It does sound like I'm just using "identify" in the same way that you're using "empathise" - the distinction I tried to draw between "what if I were him" and "if he were me" is pretty much that. I can't do characterisation without that kind of exercise and while I try not to turn the characters into me, I do necessarily make use of my own experience in trying to write them. At the least, I end up using whatever knowledge I have of different types of people to extrapolate how this character might handle a situation - but I'm also comfortable with using, e.g., my own experiences of immigration and culture shock as an entry point for thinking about what Atlantis might be like for a character like Teyla. As long as I don't drown her in myself, I don't see that as especially problematic.

But I do see your point about eliding the two words being risky. I hadn't thought of that before. I might just be too optimistic, though, in that I do see most fannish - or writerly - behaviour as cheerfully attempting as much empathy as it does identification. And I agree with Cesperanza's point about how identification - provided it doesn't swallow the whole field - can be and is a useful and pleasurable form of storytelling in itself. At the end of the day, even reading someone else's extreme Mary Sue fantasy is still teaching me something about someone other than myself - the writer. That links, in my head, somehow, with the community and sharing aspect of fandom but I'm not too clear about that.

Re: Correction to deleted post above

[hth-the-first.livejournal.com]

I might just be too optimistic, though, in that I do see most fannish - or writerly - behaviour as cheerfully attempting as much empathy as it does identification.

Oh, I do think a lot of people write in the empathic-mode rather than the identified-mode, or write in both modes at different times -- maybe a minority of fanwriters (maybe? it seems like?), but it's definitely going on. Which was exactly why I thought it was important to post something like this -- Ces has a HUGE, GIANT audience and her words carry a lot of weight, so when she says "this is what fandom is all about!" I think people are inclined to believe her. So I wanted to amend that to, "This is a big part of fannish experience, but don't forget this other stuff that's a big part for a lot of other fans."

And I agree with Cesperanza's point about how identification - provided it doesn't swallow the whole field - can be and is a useful and pleasurable form of storytelling in itself.

I actually do, too. I just think it's not the only way to tell stories or to read stories, and I think that setting it up as the unqualified central and very best way all the time where there's no such thing as too much, ever, is problematic for me.

Re: Correction to deleted post above

[zvi-likes-tv.livejournal.com]

So I read 'identifying with character X' as understanding him/her as a subject as opposed to (or as well as?) an object.

I read Cesperanza's 'identifying with character X' as choosing a character for fanactivity because of their canonical or presumed similarities to the fan doing the choosing. So, to me, objectify vs. identify works out as something like, 'pick characters because of what I'd like to do to them' as opposed to 'pick characters because of what I'd like to do.'

And I agree with hth's position on how and why it's problematic to posit 'identify' with as the heart of fannish activity.

Re: Correction to deleted post above

[solvent90.livejournal.com]

*nod* Yes, if that's what identification means in this context, then I agree with you - I don't think it's intrinsically harmful, but it's too narrow a perception of what fannish activity means.