bruceb

There's some controversy in the sf world about Mike Ashley's The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF, and about the defense of its author list mounted by Paul di Filippo. Angry Black Woman has the roundup, in her inimitable style, and it would be fair to say that di Filippo is not covering himself with glory on this one.

The key question is, should an editor trying to sample the field widely pay attention to writers' personal backgrounds—their ethnicity and sex, for starters—or not? I want to argue here that an editor interested in the best sweep should for the simple reason that writers' lives matter.

Lives don't determine writing. There are lots of engineering magazine editors and only one Gene Wolfe, but he writes the way he does partly because of what he did at Plant Engineering. I don't know of any other trout fishermen and masters of frugal living who write like Howard Waldrop, but his life shapes his prose, and the way he writes them. Robert Heinlein didn't write The Forever War or 1968 and it seems like a safe bet that Joe Haldeman isn't going to write Starship Troopers, in part because each had such a different experience of war. The Draegera series wouldn't be what it is without a painful divorce along the way. And so on.

This is all a commonplace. We—that is to say, the readership that is mostly white and mostly male—recognizes all of this, as entirely true on the individual level. We are not surprised to learn that Caitlin Kiernan is a paleontologist or Peter Watts a biologist, and while we may be surprised to find that behind the facades of Cordwainer Smith and James Tiptree Jr. were two people who knew the intelligence community from the inside, we take that information and see fresh things in their work. We accept it: lives matter.

The idea that, however, lives across the big social fault lines, like ethnicity and sex and gender and orientation, do not matter rests on nothing much more solid than the desire that they not. In spirit it's not wildly different from the creationist's grudging admission that, sure, breeds exist and breeding works, micro-scale evolution like antibiotic resistance in bacteria does happen, and all of that, but there mustn't be larger-scale evolution because there just musn't be. But lives keep on mattering. Steve Barnes has lived through things none of his co-authors have, and they've all had experiences he can't, because he's black and they're not. Alice Sheldon dealt with things Eric Linebarger didn't. And so on, and so on.

So yes, if you want to survey a field in search of the sweep of its current set of cool ideas, you need to cast your net widely enough to actually get out of your particular little cove, no matter how important it may seem from this vantage point. It may actually be important: you may be fishing in San Francisco Bay, or Puget Sound, or off Cape Cod. But there are still bays and rivers and oceans beyond where you are, and if you don't make an effort to go look in them, you simply can't have any idea what you're missing.

I've been meaning to cover some more topics, but got distracted by some other business. To work!

Intersectionality is a word you'll hear if you start reading much by people involved in trying address prejudice in an organized, systematic sort of way. I think it's an ugly word, but then I'm not wild about faan, campaign, or yiffing, either; I'm not an archon of vocabulary (yet), so I play the hand I'm dealt.

The basic concept behind intersectionality is simple, and it's one of those ideas that people tend to assent readily to but forget in the crunch. Oppression stacks. The discrimination born of racism overlaps with and changes (and is changed by) the discrimination born of sexism. Likewise with class bias, religious intolerance, and all the rest. People of different backgrounds do not experience a particular instance or even a whole system of bias working against them because their backgrounds shape what it means to them and what recourse they have.

We can, and should, talk about kinds of bias, privilege, and discrimination separately. Lots to be gained by doing so. The point of emphasizing intersectionality is to make sure that we don't stop there, but rather to push us to reintegrate the pieces and see how they work in the totality that is a person's or community's life. People have sex, gender, age, race, class, and all the rest all at once, and these change how a life moves through and against the problems raised by any one of them.

And now you know.