diceytillerman: Paolo Bacigalupi, queer kids, and dystopic tropes.

I absolutely adored Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi. I loved the world building. It's not often I can fall so hard in love with a book primarily for its world building, but it sure happened with Ship Breaker. I'm looking forward to reading The Drowned Cities.

Recently Bacigalupi wrote a post for Kirkus about the lack of gay and lesbian characters in dystopic fiction. He discusses the overlap between the type of oppressions often enacted upon the general population in dystopias, and the type of oppressions often enacted upon certain groups of people in the real world. Bacigalupi makes the powerful and critical point that gay and lesbian people in real life are often subject to the same horrifying persecution that we expect to see hammering down on "the people" (my term) in dystopic novels.

That's a stong and excellent point, and I'm glad to see it posted.

I do wish it weren't framed as an answer (though he admits it was originally an off-the-cuff answer) to the question of why more gays and lesbians aren't seen in dystopian novels. His great point is one that everyone should hear and think about, but I don't feel convinced that it explains the absence of queer folks from dystopic novels. Isn?t queerness absent from dystopias for the same reason it's absent from lots of media and art? -- cultural erasure, heteronormativity, the customary blend of hate and condescension and ignorance and forgetfulness?

Other groups oppressed in real life are also subject to some of the oppressions we see in dystopias -- it's not just queer folks, even when we expand Bacigalupi?s "gay and lesbian" category to everyone who's queer. For two more examples (limited just for space), racism and ableism cause dystopic-flavor oppressions in real life too. It's also important to note that there are queer YAs -- and YAs of color, and YAs with disabilities -- whose lives feel pretty good and happy. But my main point here is that Bacigalupi's assertion, while powerful and absolutely crucial, doesn't strike me as a reason not to have queer teens in YA dystopias. When they're missing, it's not a statement that real queer teens already live a dystopic life; it?s erasure.

To the extent that some queer teens -- and teens of color, and teens with disabilities -- do live lives that overlap with fictional dystopias, put those teens and their lives into a dystopic novel and explore how that factor of their lives weaves into the fabric of that particular fictional dystopia. To the extent that queer teens and teens of colors and teens with disabilities live lives that are happy and safe, let's put them in the dystopias that way too, and explore how that intersects with that particular dystopia. Just... put them in the dystopias. Because ?the people? in those novels should include queer kids too, and kids of color, and kids with disabilities. Being in an oppressed group in real life is no reason not to be portrayed in books, even if some of real life mimics some of that book's tropes and details. It could be a way, as Bacigalupi encourages, to "illuminate the horrors right before our eyes." Not by simply showing some of the real world's oppression fictionalized, but by doing things with it, the ways writers can. Because writers are magic.

The dystopias I'm talking about needn't simply mirror and recreate the oppression of real life. I'm not talking about piling it on, in fiction, to folks who already get their share of oppression in real life. (Note: nobody should have a share at all.) There are millions of literary paths to follow. Millions of stories to write. Millions of options as to how any real group that's currently oppressed in dystopic-trope ways could be a broad, complex part of the fabric of a dystopic novel. In the hands of good writers, these dystopias can, as Bacigalupi hopes, "be insurgent. They should force readers to question who they are, what their society is like, and what they take for granted. A good dystopia will illuminate the horrors right before our eyes, and one can hope that if it does its job well, it will create empathy and humanity in world that is sorely lacking."

Source: http://diceytillerman.livejournal.com/43737.html

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