Diversity is Not a Selfie (or, Amazing Stories + Felicity Savage = Here We Go Again)
Apparently Amazing Stories has become a version of controversy bingo. Attacks on liberals? Check. Attacks on subgenres? Check. Attacks on women? Check. Attacks on people of color? And check… I’m obviously not going to link to the story here. Instead, I’ll point you to “Diversity is not Narcissism: A Response to Felicity Savage” at The Other Side of the Rain, “Mirror, Mirror: Quien Soy?” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and “False Equivalence: Selfies and Diversity in SFF” at Radish Reviews. They’ve covered much of what I’m going to babble about here, though I’ll try to add to that existing discussion.[1] So here goes. Savage begins her diatribe by discussing the validity of “selfies,” an understandably amusing practice which has become the subject of much parodying. Of course, Savage doesn’t note that selfies have also been used for arts projects, such as the numerous videos on YouTube in which the user takes a single picture of themselves everyday for a set period of time — the purpose of these videos is not unlike a self-portrait, which Savage raises to “art” status, albeit in the form of a time capture. You might wonder what selfies have to do with diversity in SF/F. You’d be right to wonder just that, as the analogy Savage wishes us to buy into is already fallacious from the outset, as the purpose of a selfie, as she defines it, bears little resemblance to the purpose of diversity projects like Expanded Horizons or the various other magazines which have posted diversity policies. In Savage’s own words, a selfie is as follows: The principle here is a familiar one. The harder you try to look good the worse you will actually look. The pictures on the left and right illustrate of the difference between a self-portrait and a selfie. Hint: the self-portrait is the one where the subject isn’t trying to look good. Selfies remove objectivity from the subject-artist loop of creation. Add in a professional photographer or portrait artist and beauty happens. Conversely, grotesquerie is inherent in the selfie creation process, this having been reduced to a mirror-gazing session. What does this have to do with diversity in SF/F? Well, Savage doesn’t exactly say. She throws out a random line about the community seeming like a hall of mirrors, and then conveniently changes topic, leaving the weak analogy in place, but without even the attempt at explication. The only other line that references the several-paragraph description of selfies is a throwaway I’ll come back to later. The implication of these first paragraphs, however, is quite clear. If we’re to take the analogy as it is presented, then Savage believes seeking out diversity in SF/F is grotesque in the same way as a selfie: it is without objectivity; it is without art; it is simply staring into a mirror. We’re off to a good start, no? The central premise of Savage’s argument is simply this: attempting to create diversity by deliberately seeking out non-white and/or non-male writers is narcissism of the highest order: But the call for diversity is usually interpreted with deadly literal-mindedness as a call for more characters who are female / black / Asian / what have you. Why are we all so keen to see ourselves on the page? Never mind that people of all colors and genders (let alone orientations) are calling for diversity, and leave it to Savage to conveniently forget that these variations of self are merely variations of the human, let alone that the default subject has historically been white and male. That we are seeing exceptions to that rule makes those variations no less valid or important than the stock standard white dude. Savage, of course, seems remarkably oblivious to the impact of fiction or imagery on a population’s view of different peoples. There’s a reason by the Romani people are still viewed so unfavorably, and it’s not because there’s something inherently wrong with them. The public image of Romani people, as fed to us through the arts and other mediums, is rarely positive; culture undeniably functions via transmittal, and the most effective way to do so is through various forms of media. The narratives of colonization were transmitted through written travelogues, art, advertising, and so on; these held, in many cases, for centuries. In the U.S., the image of the “lazy negro” persisted well into the 20th Century, supported by plantation propaganda in the form of comical advertisements (look up “negro with watermelon” for an example) and so on. The dominant class, whoever that may be, will always seek transmittal of their cultural values.[2] The production of such diversity in admittedly artificial. Savage, however, seems to believe diversification in such artificial terms destroys SF/F’s image by reducing it to the literary equivalent of a drug-addicted celebrity: “Just don’t stare into the mirror too long or your reflection may start to look like a trout-pouted minor celebrity with a cocaine hangover.” She likewise criticizes Expanded Horizons as a space for mixing and matching “your preferred ethnic / sexual identifiers to create your very own comfort zone.” The point, however, is quite clear: diversity is actually a bad thing. Either it is a form of tokenism — a legitimate problem — or it destroys the face of genre. The latter of these two problems is an attack on diversification as a process, as it seems to suggest that a challenge against the status quo — inserting people of color or women into roles which had previously been dominated by white men — violates the sanctity of a pure space of difference. This becomes more clear when Savage writes the following: What speculative fiction does well is diversity on the species level. Our aliens, dragons, orcs, and even or especially our far-future selves ask us, in as many ways as there are books, what it means to be human. The pure space of difference — a largely white and male space — is challenged by diversity only in situations when the purity can be preserved.