-ed.

Hopefully that is better.

Anyway, Hal, today you’re my favorite person. Thank you for this post.

“that we’re dealing with segregation; that it profoundly affects the abject; that the desire for integration is not what it’s often characterised as.”

And yet another to say, American fiction is segregated; this profoundly affects the abject among the readership; their desire for that to be rectified is not to be confused with a demand for coerced thematics or coerced inclusion, or taken as a plea for cursory gestures of acceptance.

I mean, I appreciate you’re saying that political advocacy is all well and good: “I don’t have any issues with that. I don’t see anything wrong with making such a request.” But even with the rhetoric of “moral checklist” toned-down to “request,” you’re continuing to gloss my “this is how it is” as a moral imperative: “let’s change it.” That’s a directive, an exhortation, a command. So I’ll explain my persnickety adamance that this is not a valid paraphrase.

My own phrasing above is the entirety of what I’m saying in the post, boiled down by paragraph — just that, and all of it originally in response to Mark Newton’s general “Does this matter?” on his blog, a broad invitation for opinions. By which I mean, seeing that comment isolated out like this as a post on the SFWA blog one might read it as going all Sermon on the Mount, but it’s *not* proselytising a political agenda; it’s born from a firm conviction on my part, sure, but it’s a response that speaks only of the political situation and its more equitable alternative, *what* they constitute. And crucially what a desire for integration does *not* constitute. I was graciously asked if I’d let it be posted here. For sure, I said. I think the three key points are important: that we’re dealing with segregation; that it profoundly affects the abject; that the desire for integration is not what it’s often characterised as.

That last point is the crux here.

All else, I’ll stress, has been response to comments along the lines of “But how?” or “But why?” or “But what?” And even in those comments you’ll be hard pushed to find a request that isn’t actually a correction of an assumption that I’m “asking for” X, Y or Z — i.e. it remains only an attempt to articulate exactly what I mean by integration, not to spur people into action. If anything it’s essentially *ripping up* a spurious *projected* agenda that’s one of the key accelerants making discussions like this… generally less civil, shall we say.

Again, that last point is the crux here.

See, one of the most problematic aspects of that projected agenda is the automatic perception of moral coercion used as a way to strong-arm writers into particular thematics (c.f. Mishell’s comment at #3) or ridiculous strictures of inclusion (c.f. your own first comment.) In a way this very thread serves as proof of the problem, I’d say. That third paragraph of my initial post explicitly rejects the notion that a desire for integration equates to a *dictation* of thematics, and yet the third comment on the thread nevertheless projects a *moral coercion* towards just that. That same third paragraph explicitly rejects the notion that a desire for integration equates to a *dictation* of inclusion via quotas, and yet your own first comment on the thread nevertheless projects a *moral coercion* towards just that.

So even though I’ve essentially said from the get-go that a desire for integration *isn’t* about authoritative pronouncements on how writers *must* do X or be held politically/morally incorrect, that projected agenda is superimposed and I’m seen as trying to shame writers into lockstep action characterised in *the* most absolutist terms possible — “a set of commandments… a moral checklist from fiction Sinai.” This radically misreads what I’m saying as moral coercion simply by seeing it *as* the very agenda I’m saying is a *spurious projection*.

That last point is the crux here because that’s the very problem it’s addressing,

Naturally, your initial reaction in the face of perceived moral coercion is to begrudge such arguments of “shoulds and guilt”: “So not only do I now have to conform to a checklist, but I have to use the _approved_ checklist,” this being an imposition “as deadening as resurrecting the once-common Medieval stricture that all art must be about Christ.” Hardly an unreasonable response. It’s perfectly fair to say, when faced with the flamewar fuel that is moral coercion, “Dude, look at all this gasoline you’re pouring into the discourse, all this shame that’s only going to alienate the people you’re trying to coerce into action.”

Except… to do so when the person you’re addressing has poured that gasoline down the drain upfront in that third paragraph — no decrees, no quotas — precisely to take it out of the discourse, is really kinda to pour that fuel into the discourse yourself. Because if the projected agenda is an argument of “shoulds and guilt,” so too is the rhetoric of arrant prescriptivism — tablets of stone, moral checklists. When the person who’s saying, “this is the problem, how it affects us,” is faced with a response of, “Guilt-trip! Quotas! Decrees!” aren’t they equally likely to impute a moral condemnation of their purported authoritarian dogmatism? If that dogmatism is a spurious projection, if they’re being rebuked on the basis of an agenda they do not hold, they will most likely see this as abjection in action. And then the whole shithouse goes up in flames. It’s like the ginger kid raises his hand in class each day to ask the kindergarten teacher why he never gets to be hero in her stories, and she scolds him for being so demanding, not waiting his turn… what, is she meant to write him into *every* story as a token sidekick? That’s hardly fair on the other children, is it?

The incendiary nature of *all* the blaming and shaming in the discourse is why that last point is the crux, why I think it’s crucial to put the whole notion of an agenda constituted of decrees to the torch. That Straw Man needs to be burned and the ashes swept away or every call for integration is going to continue to be heard as a guilt-tripping demand for quotas. And as long as it is, the segregation will remain.

Segregation is a state, not a quality of stories. As a process it’s not enacted by stories but via stories. Like, you don’t achieve integration by ensuring that every single bus actively integrates — i.e. each one has characters of abject groups traveling on it. That’s quotas and tokenism.

I want the writers — the bus-drivers — to be the same in that *they* cease to segregate by how they allot seats on the buses. Simple as that.

Let me clarify: I mean, in so far as any group is *actually abjected* and not just… um… sorta hated, yanno, cause they’re all neo-nazi and stuff, and like, nobody with any sense of decency is down with that shit, yeah, so we sorta try to avoid them, dude. In other words, there *is* a difference. Being automatically disliked and avoided cause you’re a *fricking tool* is not the same as being abjected.

But hey, it doesn’t matter, because I can posit the full-on abjection of neo-nazis. Actually, practically speaking, in certain communities where they’re identifiable, they might well be truly abject.

See, to be abject is to be literally “cast off”. The abject is something that was once, and still is on some level, a part of ourselves. Separated out from us it has become an object of profound revulsion however, subject to irrational disgust, in part because we are *aware* that it is still, on some level, us.

The concept of abjection applies to a common psychological reaction to bodily substances like blood, shit, piss. It applies to corpses, which were once part of us-as-living-humanity. This is not to say that everyone abjects these particular things, but the reaction is common, wired into our culture even. See any Cronenburg movie.

The concept of abjection also applies to groups of individuals though. Markers of deviance — in terms of sexuality, skin colour, disability, class, culture, even gender — can be used to identify a group of individuals as a class distinct from the so-called “normative” — where the normative is *not* necessarily the majority or average, the mean, mode or median, simply the *standard*, what is taken as a *default*, a potentially arbitrary baseline from which all else is deviance.

Think of “white” skin colour. Actually, this is a range of colours — pink, peach, pale tan. And the way we’ve collapsed these to a normative “white,” constructed a notion of “coloured people” (as if people with pink, peach or pale tan skin *weren’t* coloured) is revealing of the relationship between the normative and the groups identified as distinct classes by markers of deviance. The normative is essentially *constructed* in the negation of deviance.

In terms of skin, white is an entirely *imaginary* absence of “colour”, dig? A normative standard constructed in the negation of deviance. Compare “straight” and “queer” — possibly the purest articulation of the essential non-deviant:deviant relationship.

Now, once you have a class of people distinguished out in such a way, the group identity of the normative class is basically constructed by the exclusion of members of that non-normative class. Members of that class are no longer recognised as part of the normative community. They are Other. Looking at it from inside the normative community (being a white male and all,) they are part of us that has been cast off, because they’re essentially different. Looking at it from outside (being queer and all,) suddenly we’ve been cast off, kicked away over a purely definitional border, on the basis of a criteria as arbitrary as ginger hair.

Being cast off like this automatically translates to a projection of wrongness, by the way. Being non-normative equates to being abnormal, aberrant, and in conventional mores that is invariably translated to transgressing the natural order of things. Hence the righteousness of the prejudiced.

There’s a key feature of abjection, though, that we need to bear in mind so as not to just conflate the profound prejudice and marginalisation here with mere animosity and avoidance. Remember, on a deeper level, the abject *are* just as much Us as the tiny minority of individuals who actually constitute normative in all the various possible dimensions (as opposed to those like me who might be queer but are also white and straight.) To revile and reject the abject entails a degree of confrontation in which we’re all too aware of the aspects of ourselves we recognise in the abject *because* they are, of course, have always been, Us.

But normative group identity itself rests on the negation of that! They *can’t* be Us! We must abjure them utterly! Abhor them with every fibre of our being! That which reminds us most of ourselves is to be hated most of all! That which we revile in ourselves is to be projected onto them! They must be rendered not just Other, but a cipher embodying *all* that we desire to be expunged from ourselves, all that we desire to believe *already* expunged from ourselves.

That’s what I’m talking about when I say “abjection.” As much as I call it a distinct social process, it’s also a distinct *semiotic* process. And it should not be conflated with mere animosity and avoidance any more than indoctrination into a cult should be conflated with simply getting to know a social group and doing group activities with them like bowling.

But I’ll repeat, I don’t see it as inconceivable that neo-nazis would end up abjected. Skinheads with obvious tattoos, say, in the right community could well end up being subject to the process in full, not just reviled and rejected but becoming *ciphers*, a Them that the community constructs its identity in the negation of. For the reasons above, this is irrational. It is also profoundly *dangerous* because that community is projecting its anti-Semitism out onto the neo-nazis. In a true state of abjection, the greatest power of abjection comes from the neurotic denial of traits recognised as shared. (Compare homophobia born of latent desires, whether in skinhead thugs or GOP politicos; it’s not just hypocrisy but wholesale pathology.) That means a community that is in all likelihood *rank* with anti-Semitism even as it reviles the neo-nazis for it.

So, no, my point is that abjection is not just some woolly-headed notion of not being all warm and fuzzy-wuzzy to certain peeps because we be pigeonholing them as “lawyers” or “nazis” or “men with big noses”. And given what it actually *is*, I will happily say that we shouldn’t, practically speaking, do that to anyone, *not least* neo-nazis. Not if we know what’s good for us.

You want all stories in all venues to be the same in that they cease to segregate. That’s all I was talking about. Is that not what you’re asking for?

And you’re right. It’s one thing to label a situation and be done. For example, hey, American fiction is segregated. It is or it isn’t. It’s a question of fact. However, it’s another to say, hey, American fiction is segregated, something we don’t think is good, let’s change it. This is moral. I probably shouldn’t use “political” because it connotes legislation and government policy. But it is moral. And the request made falls into that second category.

And I don’t have any issues with that. I don’t see anything wrong with making such a request. Or adding the elimination of some segregation as an objective in one’s writing. Furthermore, many who have posted, and probably a lot more who have read your post, support the cause.

My purpose here isn’t to argue against it. It’s just that there’s something about the approach, even as low key as you’ve presented it, that doesn’t work for me. But I don’t think it’s going to be profitable to explore that here.

I will say that this is one of the calmer discussions on this matter, and that’s due in large part to how you’ve attempted to explain your position. It’s given me good food for thought. Thanks

Promoting alternate venues means building more water fountains for the abject. It is not an end to segregation.

If you’re reading me as saying that I want all the stories to be a certain way, you need to reread everything I’ve said. Let’s take some edited highlights:

“It’s a state of segregation in which black, queer and members of other abject groups are not deemed to belong as main characters.”

So, we have a limitation on traits of main characters. And integration would be where black, queer and members of other abject groups *do* belong as main characters. So main characters could have those traits under integration, where segregation says they can’t. So we’re expanding the range of available traits for main characters.

“They may be allowed in as an exception if it “serves the plot” (c.f. your reviewer’s expectation of a reason for the character’s gayness.)”

So, we have a limitation on how traits are used if they are allowed in as exceptions. So integration would be where no such limitation is imposed. So traits don’t have to “serve the plot.” So plot doesn’t have to be defined by traits. So we’re expanding the range of plots available whenever traits are allowed in.

“They may be allowed in as Gay Best Friends or Magic Negros in service of the straight, white protagonist.”

So, we have a limitation of characters with certain traits to insulting clichés. So integration would be where no such limitation is imposed. So we’re expanding the range of character types available for characters with particular traits.

“There’s no requirement on an author to engage with the issues of race or sexuality or whatever as subjects; an author’s thematics is their choice.”

So, authors still get to write about anything they damn well please. In terms of subject matter, thematics, I explicitly reject any notion that I want a greater focus on X, Y or Z. So, there’s absolutely nothing to suggest I want stories to be a certain way.

I’ll leave it at that. Just reread the rest yourself. And tell me how in the name of Cock you can conceivably read this as advocating a homogenisation of fiction.