Dust and echoes

[dolorosa_12]

In the past couple of days, two stories have been making the rounds, discussed as emblematic of the intense toxicity and problems with Twitter, specifically Twitter as used as a marketing tool and social space for the SFF and YA publishing communities (of which there is of course considerable overlap).

The first is an interview with Isabel Fall, an author whose debut short story (under that nom de plume) and very identity were the subject of a hideous Twitter pile on early last year. Content note for discussions of transphobia, dysphoria, misgendering and harassment.

The second is an essay by YA commentator and critic Nicole Brinkley. Its title is 'Did Twitter Break YA?' which I assume speaks for itself.

As you might imagine, as someone who find Twitter pretty close to unbearable, and who wrote an essay last year about the problems inherent in an entire profession blurring the lines between marketing tool and social circle, these two posts resonated a lot.

That being said, putting the blame solely at Twitter's door, rending metaphorical garments about the evils of 'the algorithm' and 'parasocial relationships' and calling it a day doesn't really get to the heart of the problem. Twitter is a tool, and, like all tools used by human beings, those human beings bring the best and the worst of themselves (as individuals and as groups/communities) to the platform. The problems I've witnessed with YA and SFF Twitter certainly reached fever pitch on that platform, but I witnessed versions of the same blowups on Tumblr, and on Livejournal and personal blogs before that. I'm seeing a lot of authors jump ship to Instagram (which is of course entirely their right), but unless there is some serious soul-searching, they risk bringing the same problems with them to the new platform.

The problem with what the SFF community did to Isabel Fall was not Twitter: it was bullying, weaponising/gatekeeping of identity and authenticity (ironic given the subject of Fall's short story), and a discomfort with representation of marginalised identities/experiences that did not toe the party line. Twitter was the medium. There are people who participated in the pile on who have only offered qualified apologies, filled with special pleading, or who have not apologised at all. They hounded a trans woman back into the closet! They tried to police the identities of those who said they enjoyed Fall's story! That's not Twitter's fault — that's people choosing to be awful, to gatekeep and harass.

The problem with 'toxic YA Twitter' is not Twitter (nor is it really the open secret that most YA is bought by adult readers and is therefore written with that readership in mind): it is the fact that publishing has created this fevered atmosphere of scarcity in which it's a prudent marketing strategy to weaponise and gatekeep identity, representation and authenticity and direct Twitter mobs towards the competition. (And this ties into the wider problem of doing away with specialist marketing departments and expecting authors to handle their own marketing using social media.) Twitter, again, is the medium.

I don't have any easy solutions, because many of these problems have sprung from very worthwhile, sincere intentions — a desire to push against structural inequalities in publishing, a desire to create more stories for readers who deserve to see their lives mirrored in fiction more frequently, and to see those stories succeed. But the solution to these problems is not to rigidly define 'good representation' — that leads to people's experiences being erased, identities being policed, and Twitter mobs being directed at those whose representation is deemed to be insufficiently pure.

I do not seek a world absent of critique, negative reviews, or a wide range of reactions to every single story. But I do seek a world in which the first weapon in the arsenal of critique is not identity policing. I seek a world in which the behaviour of people in the SFF and YA communities is given greater weight in determining their character than the community's reaction to the content of their fiction. And I seek a world in which the intentions and moral character of SFF and YA readers who enjoy messy stories, dark stories, morally grey or villainous characters, and the kinds of relationships they'd never enjoy in real life are not constantly called into question.

Comments

[iberiandoctor]

Ronnie, thank you for linking to this. What happened to Fall was horrific, and it happened because, as you say, because self-righteous people felt able to be awful, to gatekeep and harass. Twitter was just the means to the end, and if it didn't exist, other similarly truncated, anonymous platforms would be deployed instead, all weaponized by the same awful, gatekeeping, violently harassing mob.

I think one of the most horrifying things is that the mob feels it's truly well intentioned and that its actions are justified. As the writer of the Fall interview said: I believe they truly feel that trans stories should only be written by trans people and that Fall should have had to out herself before publishing. I believe they believe — still — that they did the right thing. They still destroyed a woman’s life. I want to believe that we'll get past the strident voices of identity and thought policing, the kneejerk bullying and harassment that recklessly destroys lives, but the road ahead sure looks bumpy :(

[kore]

That happened with the author of My Dark Vanessa, too -- people accused her of plagiarizing a different book and she had to come forward with her own history of abuse, which she specifically didn't want to do, and people went digging and found her old twitter and livejournal accounts where she'd shared earlier drafts. So, okay, it was "permissible" for her to have written about her own experience! She said "But I do not believe that we should compel victims to share the details of their personal trauma with the public. The decision whether or not to come forward should always be a personal choice." And the person who accused her of plagiarism hadn't read the book and said on Twitter she was uninterested in doing so, just like a lot of people didn't read Fall's story, they were reacting to the reactions of people who had often just gotten upset at the title.

[iberiandoctor]

the person who accused her of plagiarism hadn't read the book and said on Twitter she was uninterested in doing so, just like a lot of people didn't read Fall's story

And to me this just underlines how shallow and kneejerk and disingenuous their accusations are, as are all criticisms based on an author's identity as opposed to the content of their work. It's lazy as well as sickening.

[kore]

I'm so old, I remember when "I cannot sully my eyes with this trash by reading/viewing it, it is so upsetting and sickening" was what the Right said about stuff people wanted to censor. (Although it did come up with radfems in the seventies about porn, I guess.) I don't think the #ownvoices debacle caused this on Twitter, but it certainly spotlit the need of some people to demand whether or not someone was authorized to tell a story like they were a cop asking for driver's license and registration.

[lirazel]

It's truly upsetting how much some of the rhetoric I've seen from the Extremely Online left-leaning people is the exact same rhetoric I grew up with in evangelical circles, only with some lexicon changes.

[kore]

Yeah, I remember the unholy matrimony of the anti-porn radfems and the anti-porn evangelicals in what was it, the very early eighties? But I don't remember so much younger women being in favour of it, altho I could be wrong (I was a preteen then). I do remember people assuming "feminist" meant antiporn when I got to college, which I thought was Just Fucking Dumb on a number of fronts, including all the VERY RECENT historical examples which at that point included Meese et al going after the Mapplethorpe exhibition, which happened the summer after my freshman year and freaked out anyone who had even heard the term "degenerate art" in Art Hist 101 classes (this was me). Not to mention if you cast even a cursory glance over the history of literary censorship, the people who got it in the neck were queer white men, women and POC. Then you had the younger more critical feminists fighting with the old rads who were anti-porn, period. -- Rambling on here because I was trying really hard to remember, but I honestly don't think I heard liberal people under, say, 25 who were really earnestly saying that kink was perversion and porn was flat out bad and Think Of The Children &c &c. Not unless they were religious or became religious later.

I dunno. I guess the cliche is the children and grandchildren of the people who fought the battle just weren't alive to see what the stakes were, but the Bluest Eye is one of the most challenged books in 2021! That was published the year I was born! The author won the Nobel Prize! It's not like we're living in some post-everything utopia here.

[lirazel]

Not to mention if you cast even a cursory glance over the history of literary censorship, the people who got it in the neck were queer white men, women and POC.

Yeah, seriously. I have a lot of problems with the sheer amount of porn we have in our culture and I do kind of worry about young kids having access to it, but anyone who thinks actual regulation would fix that...has not paid attention to the way the world works.

[kore]

tl;dr You are totally right and it's deeply deeply unsettling.

[dolorosa_12]

I think one of the most horrifying things is that the mob feels it's truly well intentioned and that its actions are justified.

That was one of the most disturbing elements of this whole affair, and it's something I've come to believe is the common denominator in a lot of these Twitter pile ons. Whatever the instigators tell themselves, and however much pain or righteous rage they feel, subconsciously an attitude has developed that that bullying is acceptable if it's directed at the right target. There's a lot of lofty talk of 'punching up,' as if they're out there taking the fight to a bunch of far-right extremists, but it appears to me that in fact in the majority of these cases, the mob is haranguing a (marginalised) newcomer to the field — someone at the bottom of the hierarchy, and outside their social circles.

I've seen this case with Fall discussed elsewhere, and the conclusion was that her very anonymity — minimal biography, no social media presence, unknown to the movers and shakers of 'progressive' SFF — painted the target on her back, because so many people in this community rely on contextual clues about the author (demographics, who their friends are on Twitter, who's promoting their story) to actually interpret the author's work, rather than the work itself. So they were condemning not the short story itself (even if that's what they claimed), but, subconsciously, the fact that the author didn't sit somewhere within their observable hierarchy, and it made them uncomfortable, and incapable of interpreting the short story.

[lirazel]

YES THIS. In this case, they only think they did wrong because it turned out to have been written by a trans woman. If it was written by anyone else, they would believe their actions to be totally justified. There's absolutely a tendency to believe that people can "deserve" any kind of ugliness at all so long as they're the wrong kind of person.

k, because so many people in this community rely on contextual clues about the author (demographics, who their friends are on Twitter, who's promoting their story) to actually interpret the author's work, rather than the work itself

This is fascinating. I hadn't thought of it in those terms, but that's so clearly true.

[kore]

Yeah, from what I know, people ONLY began to think they'd done wrong when Clarke finally said Isabel Fall was trans and wanted to pull her own story, and even then you had people like N.K. Jemisin saying that was a good thing, because it had harmed people (including the author, which....what?), and other people were still defending their reactions and trying to explain why it had been OK for them to police her identity after that. And then that started happening again after the Vox interview. She was the "right" kind of person but presented herself in the "wrong" way and EVEN NOW, people are saying "Well if Clarke hadn't had a heart attack and had said she was trans before the whole thing blew up...." That's not a solution! That's not a good alternative!

Also it just still fucking burns me up that people read the TITLE, and refused to read any further, but felt compelled to say something anyway. Some people admitted they had read the story and even liked it! but for some reason, that didn't make it into their original online opinions, because they hadn't been personally notified the author was trans. I don't know which of those makes me angrier.

[lirazel]

people like N.K. Jemisin saying that was a good thing, because it had harmed people (including the author, which....what?)

That's super disappointing.

That's not a solution! That's not a good alternative!

THANK YOU.

[dolorosa_12]

Also it just still fucking burns me up that people read the TITLE, and refused to read any further, but felt compelled to say something anyway.

The thing that really gets me about this is that reclaimed slurs are a completely normal thing in marginalised communities, including among LBGT people! This is why I think these people's egregious behaviour stemmed from their lack of context for the author, and therefore their complete inability to interpret the story. If exactly the same story (with exactly the same title) had come out with a well-known and acclaimed trans SFF author's name attached to it (especially someone in the social circles of the people who instigated the pile on) I am certain that they would have been lauding it as a clever, dark, and sharp take on complex ideas.