The Politics of Grief

Posted on March 8, 2016 by Sarah Shoker

What can political science tell us about grief? Antonin Scalia’s death provoked a mixture of disgust and admiration that was covered extensively by American and international news media.

Some progressives were ready to list Scalia’s faults and argue that, even though dead, the man needed to be held accountable. Others, including some leftists, argued that condemning Scalia’s politics was disrespectful and tasteless. Death became a de-politicizing force that elevated Scalia above contestation, an ideological position that has historic support from philosophers like Hannah Arendt, who once argued that, “what makes a man a political being is his faculty of action.” The argument might go that Scalia, now deprived of his ability to enact politics in any space that could be called ‘the public sphere,’ had become a depoliticized object. But this position obscures how dead bodies are politically managed, with some dead bodies used to advance national identity and others being omitted from civic life. Death and grief aren’t apolitical.

Literary texts, at least, suggest that mourning can be a form of political expression. Texts like Antigone and the character of Ophelia from Hamlet illustrate how grief can either consolidate or subvert state power. When President Obama visited Scalia’s body “to pay his respects”, he also reinforced the idea that grief could be managed through public practice. But is publicizing grief necessarily wrong? I don’t think so, for reasons I’ll explain below, but there are certainly some articulations of grief that should make us wary.

Judith Butler, for example, warns her readers that highly ritualized styles of mourning, often supported by state and media, can produce moments where “critical modes of questioning are drowned out.” Butler, in particular, is interested in how grief for certain bodies can meet “social and cultural force of prohibition,” a conclusion she has reached by examining LGBTQ relationships and the institutional barriers that prevent couples from engaging in certain rituals of mourning. Think of hospital visitation rights, where a seemingly mundane waiting room becomes the space where grief is managed by bureaucratic processes. Certain persons become the recipients of national mourning, with all the material support this entails, and others have their grief consigned to the margins of society through legalistic manoeuvring.

We can extend these examples to world politics. Witness how grief is often used to advance nation-building projects and manage international conflict. Children, in particular, often figure as natural innocents and become strategic assets that are used to mobilize outrage. Take the death of Mohammed al-Durrah in 2000, a Palestinian child who was filmed hiding from Israeli gunfire with his father. His mother described his death as a sacrifice “for our homeland, for Palestine.” A PLO spokesperson told the BBC that the international community shouldn’t be surprised when children participate in spontaneous uprisings when “from womb to tomb, we are condemned to sub-human living conditions.” The Israeli Defence Force similarly condemned Mohammed’s death, but then blamed Palestinian militants, arguing that the “cynical use” of “innocent children” as human shields resulted in Mohammad’s death.

Certain deaths cultivate outrage, while others are met with shrugs. When Ben Norton asked last week, “[d]o French lives matter more?” he was contrasting Western rage at the ISIS attacks in Paris with the silence on attacks in Iraq, the deadliest the country has seen this year. Answering his own question, Norton writes: “The responses — or lack thereof — from Western media outlets, governments, and citizens makes their answer obvious.” In this moment, grief could have acted as a critical intervention to the way conflict in the Middle East is usually understood.

Alternatively, we see how the grief surrounding Alan Kurdi, whose death prompted international rage, pressured the EU into adopting a more favourable stance on refugee policy, indicating that public grief has the potential to, as David McIvor writes, cultivate “ethical dispositions towards human vulnerability that would make possible a less-violent politics.” Perhaps for this reason I’m hesitant to condemn public rituals of grief, since these rituals can produce grassroots movement. But the question of whose pain is validated has an answer rooted in the asymmetries of political power.

These are only a few examples that illustrate how grief is legitimized through political ritual. Mohammad al-Durrah’s body, for example, became a stage upon which two competing nation-building visions were articulated. Alan Kurdi underwent the same treatment, and the nearly universal outpouring of grief towards his death was then later subverted when Charlie Hebedo portrayed him as an Abuser-in-the-Making on its front cover. The message was clear: the humanitarian impulse towards refugee children was misplaced, since they’d grow up to be misogynists anyway. Scalia now faces similar treatment, with various factions competing to dominate the narrative that gives meaning to his death.
I’m not convinced that dead people can remain apolitical, or that being ‘apolitical,’ (translation: being silent) is even desirable. Attempts to dampen criticism about Scalia can reinforce an ‘official’ American identity, one that’s apparently dependent on conservatism in the judicial branch. Certainly, the Republican presidential nominees have used Scalia’s status as a “legal giant,” to quote Ted Cruz, to push forward their ideas about what America should be. At first, these words seem courteous and tasteful and so haven’t attracted scorn, but kind words aren’t automatically apolitical or non-strategic and commemoration can be a way of validating ideology. Scalia’s towering reputation, according to Jeb Bush, creates an onus on Obama to nominate someone with a “proven conservative record,” after all. And as any pacifist can attest, kindness and praise shouldn’t be conflated with an absence of politics.

Can criticizing Scalia create an alternative political vision for the United States? At the very least, Scalia’s critics counter the national vision offered by state officials and their supporters. Mourners should not be compelled to reproduce civic identity in a way that celebrates some lives, like Supreme Court Justices, and marginalizes others. Celebrate or condemn Scalia, but don’t pretend that one side has a monopoly on etiquette or exists outside of politics.

Embracing Exaggeration: A Review of Cinderella

Posted on March 26, 2015 by Sarah Shoker

Cinderella is a stark contrast to ‘edgy’ television drenched in grit and grimdark-inspired fantasy novels. The film’s sets are improbably opulent, glittering, and overridden with beautiful stuff, an indication that Cinderella readily embraces its own moral exaggerations, a potentially gusty move in a time where pop culture strives to be ‘realistic’ and marks this realism with morally ambiguous characters and plot.

Cinderella is a cultural conversation between cynicism and hope. The audience is paired with an oppositional binary: cruelty versus kindness, epitomized by the step-mother and Cinderella, respectively. The characters are reduced to these traits so that the relationships and interactions become similarly exaggerated. As a result, Cinderella is committed to the tropes of the fairytale genre and is, in this way, differentiated from Everafter, the latter of which tells the story of a fairytale without using its structure, allowing for a darker retelling.

Socialized into accepting skepticism as a marker of sophistication, I initially identified these exaggerations as problems. Parody works the same way, I thought, and Cinderella looks much like Voltaire’s Candide, whose protagonist believes that optimism and destiny will eventually lead him to a fruitful end–it doesn’t. So while Cinderella clings to her dead mother’s advice (have courage; be kind), the audience sees how these words are rendered absurd in the face of abuse and neglect. Cinderella isn’t rescued by her own merits, but by a Fairy Godmother. If kindness and courage couldn’t be sustained without the help of magic, then their relevance to our everyday lives became questionable. I was spiraling deeper into condemning a fairytale for being insufficiently real and nuanced, as though the criteria for realism and nuance were determined outside the bounds of ideology. (They’re not.) Cinderella schooled me pretty quickly.

When confronted by her step-mother about how she acquired the dress, Cinderella responds that someone gave the dress to her. Her step-mother snarls back that people do not simply give and that there’s always a price to be paid, a conclusion she has reached from a lifetime of pain and loss. Cinderella says no, that sometimes people can be kind and offer help for no ulterior motive.

If fairytale exaggeration is similar to parody, then the audience is the butt of the joke. Cinderella’s response to her step-mother disrupts our assumptions about plot –in this version of the story, the dress, shoes, and carriage are not gifted to Cinderella as a reward for her kindness. To assume that the dress was a reward is an assessment that adopts the step-mother’s gaze, where good behavior should be adopted only because the consequences will be beneficial. However, Cinderella’s be kind; have courage mantra are rendered into Kantian absolutism–be kind, and damn the consequences.

I had initially misread the Fairy Godmother’ s role as that of magician and plot mechanism, instead of what she really was–a godmother. The magicking of a pumpkin into a carriage isn’t a plot device used to transport Cinderella to the ball, but a demonstration of a loving relationship. The role of the Fairy Godmother is thus subverted from reward-giver to a helping friend. In this sense, the fallacy of self-sufficiency and its subsequent lionization is subordinated to love and care.

The film isn’t perfect, of course. The narrator, voiced by the Fairy Godmother, amplifies the fairytale-like tone of the movie by shifting the film closer to the folk roots of oral storytelling. Unfortunately, the narrator doesn’t possess a distinct voice and merely describes what is readily apparent on the screen (Cinderella is sad), rendering the device entirely superfluous. A real opportunity was lost here; the film shines when illustrating how pain and grief can either twist or strengthen a person. Instead of addressing this thematic point, the Fairy Godmother repeats Cinderella’s mantra. The third person omniscient point-of-view (the voice from nowhere is disembodied, and therefore not prone to a body’s subjectivity) is used to bolster the alleged authority of the narrator, rendering the have courage; be kind mantra into objectivity instead of a suggestion with political connotations. Which, okay, fine. Film is always trying to convince the audience of something. A television show like Game of Thrones uses the aesthetic veneer of grit and grime to convince the audience of its realism, whereas a fairytale uses the omniscient voice to impart an ‘objective’ educational lesson. The issue here is that the narrative voice was redundant and offered nothing that couldn’t be gained by watching Cinderella interact with her step-mother. The narrator simply didn’t commit to its own authority.

Nuance and exaggeration often appear at odds (nuance is supposedly characterized by subtlety, after all), but in this case they blend together and challenge the audience to question why enthusiasm and sincerity seem further away from ‘realness’ than, say, the manipulation and greed in Game of Thrones. The step-mother uses her cynicism as a sign of worldliness and as way to dismiss Cinderella’s claim. The dress could not be a gift because the world is nasty, brutish, and short (to quote Thomas Hobbes.) Cinderella must have stolen the dress, instead. The step-mother, and the audience that shares the step-mother’s gaze, conflate cynicism with realism, as though “have courage; be kind” is more ideological than the dark aesthetic that is currently popular in television. The film, wonderfully, painfully, forces its audience into questioning why skepticism has become naturalized into common sense.

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You can follow Sarah on twitter: @SarahShoker

An Ambiguous Utopia: Science-Fiction and Fantasy as the Solution to our Problems?

Posted on January 20, 2015 by Sarah Shoker

Ursula K. Le Guin, giving her acceptance speech at the National Book Awards, stated that we needed writers who knew “the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies…is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.” Le Guin posited that Science Fiction and Fantasy (SF/F) were tools for imagining alternatives to capitalism.

A week prior to the National Book Awards, The Guardian published an article by Oscar Williams covering the Mindshare UK event, where Buzzfeed UK’s creative director and an event representative argued that Science Fiction over the last twenty years had become less imaginative. “[M]ore recent sci-fi film and literature has been less ambitious and…this could hamper future innovation.” They referenced 2001: A Space Odyssey’s Hal 9000 and compared him/it with Apple’s Siri, mentioned the touchscreens featured in Minority Report, and “the 70 predictions made in 1984 that have now been realised.”

A little over a month later, The Guardian published another article on the climate of SF/F, this time by Damien Walter, positively noting that 2014 was the year that the genre “woke up” to diversity, naming, amongst several titles, Anne Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, which reimagines the importance (or lack thereof) of gender. Leckie’s novel won the Hugo, Nebula, Clarke and BSFA awards and some of the best novels of 2014, Walter notes, were from the science-fiction and fantasy genres. Of course, awards organizations haven’t completely ignored diversity. I recently finished The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge, a science-fiction epic that contains substantial gender and racial diversity and that won the Hugo Award in 1981. However, Walter rightly points to the increasing volume and acceptance of these works by readers and publishers.

Within the span of one month, we have contradictory viewpoints about what makes “good” science-fiction and fantasy and apparent agreement that these genres should be instrumentalized to serve social purposes.

I read the comments by Buzzfeed’s creative director with irritation and wondered if he was blithely ignoring the tomes of interesting science-fiction literature being produced by authors like China Mieville, G. Willow Wilson, Kameron Hurley, Ken Liu, Cory Doctorow…and on and on and on I could go. However, his comments became more understandable upon realization that “good” science fiction was being defined as science-fiction-that-will-let-us-invest-in-more-gadgets. Using this reasoning, a time machine should be produced so a time traveler can invest in historically low-cost real estate. Good science-fiction becomes a mechanism which assists in the production of capitalist expansion, of “innovation.”

Despite Le Guin’s appeal that “[t]he profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art,” science fiction and fantasy is often complicit with the growth of private enterprise and with Le Guin’s other pet peeve, state-sanctioned militarism. The United States military provides material resources to Michael Bay. Newt Gingrich wrote the forward for William R. Forstchen’s One Second After, a novel that features an electromagnetic attack on the United States, which Gingrich argues that the country must be prepared to encounter. Both the American and Canadian militaries have recommended reading lists for their personnel that include several science-fiction titles like Starship Troopers, China Attacks, and The Third World War. Science Fiction and Fantasy have also been instrumentalized to serve the interests of a central authority that(allegedly) has a monopoly on legitimate political violence: the state.

In her acceptance speech, Le Guin framed science fiction and fantasy as potential disrupters to the status quo. From this lens, science-fiction and fantasy function as mechanisms that de-socialize readers from normalized assumptions about how the world should work. I’m very sympathetic to this view and at a conference I attended in November, I argued that SF/F was explicitly engaged in recreating normative standards.

By arguing that fantastical texts influence the social world, Le Guin invites the social sciences to meet with and consider fiction seriously. As a student of international relations (IR), I find that SF/F is particularly suitable for my discipline because of the genre’s emphasis on concise world-building. Consequently, I’m more than happy to include SF/F in my scholarly presentations and research–with the understanding that fiction shouldn’t be viewed as possessing a special monopoly on truth and fiction writers are not prophets whose visions have greater status than ordinary workers. Le Guin isn’t naïve about SF/F, though: the subtitle for The Dispossessed is An Ambiguous Utopia, after all.

Unfortunately, the kind of intellectual disruption advocated by Le Guin often comes at a cost. As Le Guin points to sales departments’ influence on book purchasing and publishing, researchers are also restricted by scholarly expectations; certain journals will only publish articles with specific theoretical orientations and scholars who challenge the limits of a particular discipline risk limiting their publication and employment opportunities. So too does the fiction industry prioritize certain trends over others, though perhaps SF/F publishers are more receptive to alternative realities, as long as the world-building is rigorous and systematic. Still, those researchers and authors who do not have social clout are more likely to tread cautiously and produce work that fits into already identifiable boundaries.

There are always exceptions, obviously, and the Guardian article on diversity in SF/F illustrates that the industry may be undergoing a transition. Notably though, even Le Guin had to stealthily insert that Ged, one of her most famous protagonists, was a person of colour later into the story than right at the outset of the novel. This writing decision wasn’t a result of publisher pressure, but because Le Guin feared that her readers may not “immediately identify with a brown kid.” Some of the early covers of the Earthsea series featured a white protagonist, and when the Sci Fi Channel televised the EarthSea series, Le Guin wrote in Slate that the channel “wrecked” her books by whitewashing her characters. SF/F’s influence on revolutionary change becomes slightly questionable in the context of gatekeepers who prioritize incrementalism. There is also the shadow of the reader hanging over the author’s head, where even writers like Le Guin have adjusted their writing to real-world constraints like racism. Hiding Ged’s skin colour could be interpreted charitably. By slowly introducing the idea that PoC characters can be likeable, Le Guin uses fiction as an emancipatory mechanism. This decision could also be less kindly described as a form of self-policing which compromises the radicalness of her project. SF/F can de-socialize readers, sure, but what happens when writers are socialized by their readers into writing more “palatable” literature?

Perhaps some would laugh at the idea that there’s any connection between elves and the social sciences. I once heard a professor express confusion at the popularity of fantasy fiction because “elves aren’t real.” But sovereignty, statehood, nationhood, and citizenship are constructed ideas (and still remain ideas; you certainly can’t touch sovereignty though we feel its effects) with very real material consequences. The boundaries between knowledge/practice and reality/fiction aren’t particularly clear, especially if we view texts, both realist and fantastical, as socializing forces. I would argue against positing a stark difference between an “idea” and an “action,” as most norms gain status as “common sense” through practice.

The selection process for deciding what is a “better” or “worse” text is valuable and eventually a judgment must occur on what works merit publication. This process involves a set of standards or codes that aspiring scholars and writers follow. But this process becomes problematic if the work that is selected for publication becomes repetitive and unquestioned, like a fantastical trope that becomes a sacred cow that prevents better stories from emerging (I’m looking at you, “hero’s journey.” You’re good, but we treat you like a rule instead of a suggestion.) Science Fiction and Fantasy have their own ontological starting points, their own boundaries, and prioritize certain ways of thinking. The very structure of a book is a boundary, and so places an actual physical limit on the author’s imagination. Fantastical fiction isn’t the holy grail and isn’t the answer to all of our problems. But as an exercise in deconstructing entrenched beliefs, SF/F can behave like a remedy to tired ways of thinking.

I do not want to turn science fiction and fantasy into a second-class citizen, where the purpose of the genre is to serve the interest of other disciplines or industries. I recognize that this article treats literature instrumentally and not as a good in its own right. My aim isn’t to oppose “literature for literature’s sake,” but to recognize that people will, inevitably, use texts to create personal meaning and to understand the world. Le Guin’s acceptance speech was too clean and employed a narrative that treated SF/F as a monolithic force for good, if only those pesky capitalists could leave art alone. Le Guin’s optimism is understandable as one is generally gracious when accepting an award, after all. However, as a graduate student, I am always troubled by optimism (kidding, maybe.) Still, the increasing diversity in SF/F is a positive sign that the industry is capable of self-criticism and adapting to new ideas. This change should render readers hopeful that SF/F can do what Le Guin promises: destabilize comfortable ideas.
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Sarah Shoker is a PhD student in Political Science at McMaster University, where she once used Lord of the Rings in a presentation to explain a Foreign Policy conundrum. She regularly quotes from Harry Potter to her more respectable colleagues. You can follow her on twitter @SarahShoker.

**I would like to thank my colleague, Ira Lewy, for first informing me about military reading lists and the navy’s rather unfortunate decision to assist Michael Bay in producing more movies.

Economics in Fantasy Literature, Or, Why Nerds Really Like Stuff

Posted on May 14, 2014 by Sarah Shoker

There is no rule stating that fantasy literature must involve a pre-industrial setting, but Tolkien’s grip remains strong and the maps included at the beginning of epic fantasy novels illustrate a strong attachment to land rather than economic “development” (or degradation, as per Tolkien’s philosophy on modernity.) Pre-industrialization, by its very definition, eschews mass production and growth. Even in urban fantasy, the modes of production that sustain the magical world don’t usually involve factory processes. There are notable exceptions, of course, like Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series, but I think this description is a fair representation of the genre.

The role of “stuff” in fantasy fiction remains vitally important to fantastical stories and potentially serves to discipline fantasy readers into valuing certain cultural artifacts over others. Wikipedia has a page dedicated to a sizable—and incomplete— list of fictional swords with names. Certain artifacts are imbued with symbolic qualities (eg. King Arthur’s Excalibur and Holy Grail) and some magic systems are reliant upon material things (eg. wands in Harry Potter.) Though economic systems within fantasy literature are usually underdeveloped or neglected by authors, artifacts remain fetishized, used both as a way of adding authenticity to the secondary world (the presence of swords signals to readers that they are situated within a particular genre and provides a pathway for authors to play with certain tropes), and developing the protagonist’s identity. But from where does this economic model originate and how, if at all, does this conceptualization of stuff impact present-day nerd consumerism? Because while the role of economic exchange is left ambiguous in much fantasy literature, the centrality of stuff like wands, crystal balls, amulets, and named swords are not.

J R. R. Tolkien creeps into most discussions of fantasy literature, even when intentions are bent on his exclusion. China Mieville, both highly critical and highly thankful to the man, once called Tolkien “the big Oedipal Daddy” of fantasy literature, a label with which I’m forced to concur. Tolkien was heavily influenced by his academic work as a scholar of Anglo-Saxon literature, a research interest which inevitably shapes this discussion. He began writing The Hobbit shortly after translating the epic poem Beowulf. The dragon in The Hobbit is thought to be directly influenced by the epic poem. Tolkien’s work emulates Beowulf’s vagueness surrounding the production of goods, features similar rural mileus, and focuses more on treasure than merchandise. In his book Honour, Exchange, and Violence in Beowulf, Peter Baker writes:

[T]he world of Beowulf gets along entirely without coinage. The poem mentions land as a reward for valorous deeds, but land seems to lack all practical value: if noble Danes and Greats collect rents in money, food or service, the poet considers the fact too trivial to notice…Indeed, the only category of wealth that interests the poet and his characters is treasure.

The acquisition of treasure was done primarily through looting, and Baker writes that violence in Beowulf was not seen as a sign of social disintegration but as an ‘essential element in the heroic system of exchange (sometimes called the Economy of Honour.)’ In general, the accumulation of goods in fantasy literature is linked with the successful completion of good deeds. Part of the hero’s journey may involve a quest to recover certain items, yet the acquisition of stuff in fantasy literature is not about consumerism but a reflection of the protagonist’s righteousness or destitution. In Beowulf, for example, treasure is used to secure loyalty and ensure the continuation of a just society. Further examples include the destruction of the One Ring, the destruction of the Seven Horcruxes in order to defeat Voldemort and the search for the Deathly Hallows, and The Sword in the Stone– an object which arbitrates rightful inheritance to the throne.

Though not all fantasy settings are rural—and some fantasy authors focus on urban settings as a reaction to Tolkien’s idealization of pre-industrial life. Michael Moorcock, in particular, argued that Tolkien’s fascination with pre-industrialization was nostalgic and “infantile.”

Since the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, at least, people have been yearning for an ideal rural world they believe to have vanished – yearning for a mythical state of innocence (as Morris did) as heartily as the Israelites yearned for the Garden of Eden. This refusal to face or derive any pleasure from the realities of urban industrial life, this longing to possess, again, the infant’s eye view of the countryside, is a fundamental theme in popular English literature.

Even in fantasy novels that feature urban environments, magical items are not produced through the methods of mass production. There aren’t too many wand-making factories. When large-scale manufacturing operations are displayed, they are usually situated as a site of oppression. Tolkien described the industrial period as “the robotic age,” despite early industrialization’s reliance on cheap sources of labour (women and children). The rejection of the methods of mass production is not unconscious on Tolkien’s part—Sarumon’s destruction of Fangorn Forest to pursue his own mining operation is portrayed as unabashedly evil. More recently, Brandon Sanderson’s excellent Mistborn trilogy features a covert mining operation controlled by an elite class that would like to restrict the use of magic (Sanderson’s magic system is fueled by minerals) and which is the site of class oppression and slavery.

I find the absence of economic preoccupation, which centers contemporary life but is pushed to the periphery in fantasy literature, fascinating. There’s stuff, but no theory about stuff. The acquisition of stuff is not usually related to the accumulation of wealth, but there’s no doubt that items incurred in fantasy novels are in some way special. They are unique snowflakes that arrive at key times in the plot, signaling growth in the character’s identity. (Think of Will, from Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, who grapples with moral challenges because he possesses The Subtle Knife.)

In particular, I wonder if the desire for nerds to own ‘limited edition’ consumer goods is related to the glamorization of items within fantasy worlds. Collecting limited edition ‘stuff’ has always been linked with nerd identity. Think of the cliched stereotype of the dweeb who collects mint-condition-never-removed-from-the-box-limited-edition Star Wars action figures and who can recite, in an encyclopedic fashion, their stats. These toys become a physical manifestation of one’s nerd identity. Similarly, the oohs and aahs towards those who manage to acquire ‘stuff’ from movie sets reveals a longstanding philosophy about authenticity: you got the real one. I’m not immune from the temptation of ‘rare artifacts.’ At last year’s San Diego Comic Con, I braved the Dark Horse line to purchase a limited edition (run of 1200, exclusive to Comic Con) House Stark Shield. And my views on Game of Thrones can, at the best of times, be described as ambivalent.

Of course, instead of monarchs awarding heroes with treasure, the fetishization of ‘rare’ artifacts in the primary world is mediated through private commercial entities. Limited edition consumer items are still products of capitalism–my Stark Shield was produced in a factory. (And so were the fantasy books…) Fantasy literature’s popularity is sustained by the very process it ignores or derides. ‘The capitalists’ (twirling mustache, top hat) have had no difficulty appropriating ‘items’ into the robotic age for nerds who view Comic-Con as a pilgrimage and the acquisition of special edition Lego as a quest.

But there’s anxiety within this relationship, a push-back because consumerism is just too easy. Mass production involves the masses, after all, and some fans argued that the whole-scale embrace of fantasy consumer goods is a form of appropriation rather than adoption. The former term, of course, implies an inauthentic masquerade on the part of the consumer. The latter term implies that the person is not an authentic member of the community. The perception is, perhaps, that these people are role-playing and will remove their nerd-drag once the sub-culture loses its mainstream appeal.??I cannot ignore the intersection of class and gender in this exchange. Anyone can enter a Target store and purchase a Star Wars t-shirt, but the ease of this purchase creates doubt in the wearer’s identity. Is this person really a ‘true nerd?’ Despite repeated calls for folks to quit patrolling the boundaries of nerdom, certain groups (mostly girls and women) are still required to justify their commitment to the community by, at times, being asked to respond to spontaneous pop-quizzes by self-appointed police officers of Kingdom Geek. Money functions as a good way to participate in a sub-culture that has long been defined by its rejection of irony and whole-scale enthusiasm of ‘cool stuff.’ A t-shirt from Target does not necessitate the grueling process (sarcasm—all that’s needed is more money) of purchasing a flight to a comic-con and waiting in line for several hours in hopes of acquiring limited edition whatever—the quest and the story related to the acquisition is removed, but the product is still worn as a symbol of identity, potentially allowing those with lower incomes (like young people and women) to participate in nerd sub-cultures.

Unfortunately, this participation has been met with a certain elitist attitude about what kind of labour or consumerism is good enough to qualify as being part of the community. Limited edition or not, it’s all capitalism. But to elitists, some capitalisms are better than other capitalisms. Consumerism is no longer enough because one must be a discerning consumer. And of course, testing the knowledge of other fans, often directed towards teenage girls, displays a kind of anxiety towards the opening of borders that has resulted from nerdiness’ capitalist expansion. Knowledge becomes another form of currency, the arbitrator between the high-brow collector of art and the dirty prol who can’t tell the difference between a first and second edition something-or-other.

All of which is to say that ‘fantasy economics’ has some serious real-life implications regarding inclusion, exclusion, and the powerful role of stuff/artifacts/things in identity creation. Fantasy has the potential for being highly critical of consumerism and contains the tools to imagine differently. Unfortunately, I do not think that most fantasy literature is currently engaged with these issues. Rather, pre-industrial economic practices provide convenient short-hands to indicate magic and swords—it’s a trope that some writers have confronted but most haven’t.

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Images: John William Waterhouse, “The Crystal Ball With the Skull” and “Psyche Opening the Golden Box”

About the author: Sarah Shoker is a PhD candidate in political science at McMaster University in Canada. She’s currently completing a fantasy novel that is conspicuously absent of named swords, but she’d love you to publish it anyway. You can follow her on twitter @SarahShoker.

How Ariel Became Disney’s Bad Woman: A Look at Disney’s Frozen and The Little Mermaid

Posted on January 21, 2014 by Sarah Shoker

Tongue in cheek, a few of my friends will wonder aloud how I can be so very obsessed with Disney if I’m a feminist. Wink, nudge.

Though these jokes are, well, jokes, they hint at common cultural understandings of Disney’s relationship to women and feminism. Comments that I’ve heard imply that being a feminist can, somehow, be quantitatively determined by one’s hobbies and likes and, once graphed on some X-Y axis or other, that feminism is negatively correlated with an appreciation for Disney movies. Similarly, some Disney princesses are seen as more or less feminist by virtue of their hobbies. Merida from Brave is a feminist because she doesn’t care for marriage and likes archery, but Ariel, from The Little Mermaid, isn’t a feminist icon because, well, she obsesses/lusts/romances over a prince and surrenders her voice in an attempt to win him over. However, this reading of Ariel is too easy, too clear, an analysis that lacks the messiness that comes hand-in-hand with desire and obsession.

Strangely, however, instead of rigorous feminists accusing Disney of this mish-mash of oppression, the protests against Disney show up on my Facebook feed from casual allies, non-feminist men, brogressives, and teenagers engaged in various sub-cultures. Protesting Disney is no longer the foray of feminists who, in any case, have been long-time fans of complicating narratives, a tradition in which I am happily cemented. Just as male comic book nerds protest the antiquated gender roles in Twilight, so too have these groups accused Disney of not following some make-believe feminist handbook. I’m left hearing sarcastic comments or well-meaning comments, both annoying, that caricaturize the meaning of strength and reconstitute feminism as a rigid set of rules instead of an analytical category with emancipatory possibilities. What of Virigina Woolf, who declared that “a feminist is any woman who is honest about her life?”

I’m not interested in rescuing Disney from its errors—of which there are many—but I am interested in complicating dominant narratives surrounding Disney heroines and how our very rejection of romance, a rejection based on a belief that Strong Women just don’t do this and that and they especially don’t obsess over boys, is a form of reifying traditional gender norms. Not only does rejecting infatuation create social problems (goodbye, teenage girls, your problems matter no more), but the existence of uncontroversial female characters who don’t make mistakes, experiment with love, and aren’t obnoxiously demanding risks veering into Mary Sue territory. In Frozen, Disney avoids controversy by constructing a plot where good people react to situations beyond their control. In The Little Mermaid, Ariel is an active participant in her own plot; she makes mistakes that she then tries to fix, or makes decisions that the audience finds disagreeable but that she defiantly claims for herself. In fact, Ariel’s entire character is marked by defiance and resistance, making her a more compelling but polarizing character.

I enjoyed Frozen, as I was instructed to enjoy the film—I couldn’t help but feel like the film was green-lit with the approval of a focus group consisting entirely of my clones. But as I watched the film, I shifted uneasily in my seat because, though Disney had created a story focusing on sisterly love instead of the usual male-female romance, the plot was underdeveloped because the main character, Anna, was written as a parent-approved role model. The desire to avoid the criticisms that have usually stalked Disney princesses suffocated Frozen like a pageant parent who scrubs her child clean and only allows her to perform in ways approved by the judge. The result is a delightful movie, a movie that we expect. But is creating a clean-cut and uncontroversial character a sign of progress?

Disney’s Frozen was a film that was self-aware of its legacy, as illustrated by the song “Love is an Open Door,” where Anna falls in love and becomes engaged to Prince Hans in the course of a 3 minute song-montage on the night of her sister’s coronation. Like many contemporary young adult films and books, an inevitable love triangle occurs once Anna leaves the castle in search for her sister and befriends Kristoff. He asks her, in absolute disbelief, how she could become engaged after knowing someone for one day. (And he also insists that all men pick their noses and eat their boogers, a statement which I refuse to empirically verify.) Anna retorts that it’s true love, duh. Disney engages in some fun inter-textual analysis where it pokes at its own films. Historically, their films have featured heroines that have hopscotched into a life of happily-ever-after once the obligatory two-second kiss has been bestowed by a prince whose name the audience doesn’t even know.

Instead of focusing on the love triangle, however, Frozen is a story about sisterly love, though still featuring the theme of sacrifice commonly found within Disney. Its strength lies in its characters grappling with notions of responsibility and learning what love truly means. However, despite its excellent passing of the Bechdel test, Frozen has a number of problems with plot. Here I grated my teeth. Because I was supposed to fall in love with Frozen and I kind of did—finally, a Disney film that could meet my feminist credentials. Except, as a wannabe storyteller, I could see the problems caused by trying to keep Anna controversy-free and within the box of “appropriate role model.”

Frozen’s plot seems to advance through convenience instead of character agency. Ariel must choose between her obsession and her family, a decision which infuriates casual Disney watchers—how could she choose a boy over her family? How could she give up her voice for a man? But Anna isn’t required to make this decision. Instead of Anna rejecting Hans, admitting that she may have made a mistake, Hans is conveniently revealed to be a Bad Guy who used Anna as a way of becoming king. This plot-twist is also familiar, though Disney seems to have gender-bent the trope. Margaret Atwood once remarked that Victorian love-triangles often featured ailing wives dying conveniently so that the path would be made clear for the heroine and the dark, brooding hero to get married without facing the prospect of actually divorcing, a decision which would remove sympathy from the male lead. Anna’s good-heartedness is solidified when she is omitted from having to make this difficult decision; if Hans had been good and she had broken off the engagement then she becomes too complex, too authoritative, too unsympathetic.

In a sense, Frozen features characters that are the victim of circumstance rather than their own choices, a writing mechanism which shields them from the controversies that have plagued other princesses who have made questionable decisions. Anna discovers the true nature of love by saving her sister, a type of selfless love that is above criticism but a role that girls and women have traditionally been expected to fulfill anyway. Anna’s life is never seriously in danger, of course, (and not because Disney is the creator—the studio has made a number of darker films) and so the question of her sacrifice, plot-wise, is compromised. Discovering the meaning of selfless love is an important part of human development, but a theme that would have been sharply criticized had Anna sacrificed herself for Kristoff instead of Elsa—a claim that I cannot prove empirically, but which I feel confident in asserting upon observing how we treat teenage girls trying to understand their sexuality –poorly. Despite Anna being distinctively cute, Frozen is relatively free of sexual desire minus short bursts of puppy love and infatuation with Hans, which are shown to be a Big Mistake when Hans reveals his duplicitous nature. In the end, Anna faces a choice; be rescued by true love’s kiss (from Kristoff) or sacrifice herself to save Elsa. She chooses the latter.

Disney’s The Little Mermaid is an undeniably darker story, though the original story by Hans Christian Anderson is even more bleak. Whereas Anna and Kristoff share a bumbling and endearing kiss at the end of the film, Ariel spends much of The Little Mermaid lusting after Prince Eric’s body. She wants to be human, wants their legs, to know what it feels like to walk. Eric is a prince, but he’s also a body that is imbued with symbolism—he’s not only Eric, but a representation of everything she wants. She gushes over him, and once she saves Eric from the peril of the sea and returns him to land, pauses to admire him, leaving no question that her crush is based on sexual desire. It’s this sexual desire that makes Ariel a controversial character.

Though Ariel is often condemned for leaving her family for “a boy,” she is, to me, a more interesting character because she made a difficult decision with moral consequences that cannot be waved away with a magic wand. It is precisely Ariel’s aggression, stubbornness, and ability to carve out her own plot by making questionable decisions that leaves a lasting impact. The permanence of her decision makes Ariel’s sacrifice more impactful than Anna’s sacrifice, the latter whose decision we know will have no lasting consequence because love will act as a magical healer and “save the day.” Ariel’s decision to marry Eric, however, isn’t heroic—heroism is selfless, and her desire to marry Eric is tainted by the fact that she’s doing something for herself. In the real world, she might be called selfish or a bitch.

She crushes hard on a human prince, has a hoardish obsession with collecting human artifacts, and eventually exchanges her voice for a pair of human legs so she can pursue Prince Eric and, if he falls in love with her in the requisite time period, will remain human forever. These human legs come at the cost of engaging with Urusula the Sea-Witch—but only after her father, King Triton, discovers her cave of human objects and destroys all that she loves, objects which are the source of her knowledge and curiosity. This tough-love disciplinary approach is for her own good—an argument as novel as the Old Testament when Adam and Eve were tossed out of the Garden because Eve just had to taste the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. Ariel becomes Eve, obsessing over artifacts that promise to unfold secrets but with the potential to unbridle her sexuality. Eventually, her decision to give up her voice for a pair of legs is shown to be a mistake, because post-1990 Disney films always comes with the “be yourself” moral message. However, the film is perfectly clear that her father was also mistaken to control her. Some audiences remember the former message, but not the latter.

I am still surprised when people condemn Ariel, especially when her father is the one who believes that her desire for human knowledge is a source of harm and whose destruction of her possessions drives her into the arms of Ursula the Sea Witch, a character who functions as some kind of fat woman quasi-capitalist obsessed with creating unfair contracts in hopes of usurping the monarchy and the “rightful” king—she’s worthy of admiration, really. Ariel is the prototypical Bad Woman, removed from the roster of Acceptable Feminist Heroines (by those who parody feminism?) because she has sacrificed her family for self-fulfillment. We’re condemning Ariel for her disobedience.

In the end, her father realizes that it’s unfair to prevent Ariel from being happy and, with his magical trident, grants her legs. The reconciliation between Ariel and her family mirrors the ending of Bend it Like Beckham, but the latter is situated as a British “girl power” movie because the main character wants to play soccer, a goal that is valued more than romance in the hierarchy of fictitious Approved Feminist Activities. (And because the main character of Bend it Like Beckham is brown, and we’re more comfortable seeing brown daughters rebel against their fathers because our own orientalist inclinations lead us to view their family structures as innately oppressive—but girls rebelling against white men? Well, that just won’t do.)

My conclusion is fairly trite and I don’t mind admitting it; imperfect characters make for compelling stories. Restraining ourselves and making characters that shy away from controversy can actually reaffirm the gendered expectations that we’re trying to avoid. Often, what we do not question, such as selfless love for family, is steeped in normativity. Allow teenage girls the agency and the opportunity to make mistakes, to lust. Stories can do many things, and at the very least we should, on occasion, be challenged. Stories also deserve our criticism, of course, but they deserve levelled, thoughtful, and nuanced criticism that does not unintentionally reproduce a hierarchy of values that only congratulates selflessness and condemns self-fulfillment.

Jailers Hate Escapism: Epic Fantasy as Subversive Literature

Posted on May 6, 2013 by Sarah Shoker

“Tell me one last thing,” said Harry. “Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?”

“…Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”
–Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Writing on the Game of Thrones season three premiere, a reviewer at the New York Times who confessed to being a fan of the science fiction and fantasy genre casually mentioned that upcoming discussions on slavery and women’s liberation were “heavy handed…particularly for a show set in the medieval period.” Twitter reacted swiftly, with Alyssa Rosenberg from Think Progress satirically tweeting, “may the Lord of the Light save me from people who are made uncomfortable by thinking about issues in their entertainment.”

Shunted away, at a private kiddie table and apart from allegedly serious literature, fantasy fans have been jostling for recognition and fending off accusations that their beloved genre is immature, escapist, and unrealistic. High/Epic Fantasy, in particular, has been accused of being regressive, conservative, and reactionary, intent on preserving an ideology of traditional gender scripts and maintaining a cast of lily-white characters. In western culture(s), epic fantasy is thought to describe the British medieval period, albeit with dragons and magic, but a more accurate description would be that post-1960s epic fantasy is influenced heavily by J.R.R Tolkien, whose irritation with industrialization and what he called “the robotic age” are palpable in his idealized version of rural life as represented in the Shire. In an interview with the International Socialism Journal, China Mieville states that:

You…have to remember that many works within that tradition question or undermine its more conservative aspects. However, it is true that the hold of that conservatism is strong in the genre, and it’s also true that that particular post-Tolkien stream is what most people these days mean when they talk about ‘fantasy’.

It would be unfair to point exclusively at Tolkien for his long-lasting influence on epic fantasy when the genre’s heritage has also been influenced by commercial considerations. Between 1969 and 1974, Ballantine re-issued around seventy classic fantasies in their Adult Fantasy series and published a number of significant new authors like Ursula K. Le Guin and Marion Zimmer Bradley. However, none came close to matching the commercial success of The Lord of the Rings.

In 1977, new Ballantine editors, Judy-Lynn Del Rey and Lester Del Rey, believed that fantasy fiction could become a real mainstream success if promoted properly. As an experiment, they took two new authors out of their slush pile, Terry Brooks (Sword of Shannara) and Stephen Donaldson (The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever) and marketed them explicitly as books for people who liked Lord of the Rings. Both novels were immediate best sellers and set the stage for the fantasy genre’s commercial viability. The long tradition of conservatism in fantasy has partially been the result of commercial constraints—editors know what’ll sell.

Mieville goes on to list a number of traits he associates with conservative ideology, what he also calls “feudalism lite.”

…[I]f there’s a problem with the ruler of the kingdom it’s because he’s a bad king, as opposed to a king. If the peasants are visible, they’re likely to be good simple folk rather than downtrodden wretches (except if it’s a bad kingdom…). Strong men protect curvaceous women. Superheroic protagonists stamp their will on history like characters in Nietzschean wet dreams, but at the same time things are determined by fate rather than social agency. Social threats are pathological, invading from outside rather than being born from within. Morality is absolute, with characters–and often whole races–lining up to fall into pigeonholes with ‘good’ and ‘evil’ written on them.

These labels pose a challenge to engaged writers and readers of the genre who love the epic fantasy tradition but do not necessarily believe in its innate marriage to escapism, and maybe don’t even believe in conservative ideology’s innate attachment to escape either. Mieville, for his part, has all together eschewed the rural setting so prevalent in epic fantasy and has chosen to feature heavily urbanized settings in his writing.

The conservative tradition Mieville describes is, of course, not the same as American-style conservatism and refers to British high toryism (similar to Canadian red toryism), an ideology which accepts the presence of class inequalities and traditional social stratification as long as society elites provide, through charity or government legislation, assistance to the marginalized. Key words: nobless oblige. Critics of High/Red Toryism describe the ideology* as paternalistic, as its justifications for social stratification have historically relied on a mandate from God. If ever you wondered about the rampant use of prophecies in epic fantasy, then consider its link to high toryism: birth is destiny.

Questions of free will aside, these prophecies often form the basis of what Joseph Campbell calls “the hero’s journey.” Hero leaves home, finds magical helper, overcomes trials, receives rewards. (I call this description the “plot coupons” formula, where the reader can cash in these coupons for a feel-good adventure. Hero finds magic cat; Hero finds magic sex; Hero defeats magic villain etc.) Royalty often provide structure to these quests, functioning as characters that recognize the hero’s achievements, set the hero on his or her quest, or punish the villain.

In her doctoral thesis, Kings. What a Good Idea, Pamela Freeman writes that in stories in which a king is the protagonist, we’re likely to see the oft-used “Rightful Heir” or “Missing Heir” trope. See: King Arthur, Aragorn, Harry Potter, Rand from The Wheel of Time, Eragon, and most novels that involve a young boy that leaves his home to embark on an adventure. On one hand lie patriarchal inheritance laws that govern the transmission of inheritance between male blood lines, an issue of justice and fairness that is familiar to most people, despite or because of its problematic gendered connotations. On a more emotional level, there’s hunger to belong and to complete a family, that the truth about one’s blood line and birth status is worth knowing and that without the truth the person will live a suspended life fraught with emotional anxieties. Conservative or not, this plot-line directly confronts our emotional anxieties.

The question then becomes why people living in democratic countries would be interested in reading books about social stratification and monarchy. Pro-monarchists (the real-world kind) usually defend royalty on the basis that monarchs represent all of their citizens and thus provide continuity and identity to a nation, whereas elected officials can only represent their constituents. (For those who say, “but…presidents?” most pro-monarchists live in constitutional monarchies that use a parliamentary system. Prime Ministers aren’t directly elected by the people.)

Freeman states that “tyranny has been replaced with an image of pastoral care, ensuring that today will be like tomorrow, protecting us from political machinations and…extremes of any kind.” She links a distrust of elected officials and desire for continuity with epic fantasy’s focus on “rightful kings.” Writers use kings precisely because they’re traditional, and therefore meaningful. Of course, the common image of a rightful king preserving the collective peace amongst his people is a historical judo-flip unsupported by an even cursory empirical observation but, nevertheless, rightful kings prance around and disseminate compassionate justice in epic fantasies with more regularity than they ever did in history and this has led critics to deride the genre as escapist because it’s not “real.”

But labelling the epic fantasy genre as unserious also stems from the 19^th century rise of the modernist tradition that undervalues story and prioritizes style. Traditionally, epic fantasy is told conservatively and is rarely experimental, omitting surprising shifts in time or point of view. This ordered narrative prioritizes story-telling by giving readers access to familiar non-experimental style, which consequently allows them to suspend skepticism (or to even believe, as Tolkien states in his lecture On Fairy Stories) without awkward mental breaks that would shatter the belief of the secondary world. In a much quoted passage, E.M Forster articulates the modernist position on storytelling, calling its relationship to the novel as “the backbone—or may I say tapeworm, for its beginnings and end are arbitrary. It is immensely old—goes back to Neolithic times, perhaps to Paleolithic. Neanderthal man listened to stories, if one may judge the shape of his skull.”

The fantastic’s historical link to oral folk ballads and storytelling is fairly obvious, but this modernist disdain for its oral roots reveals Forster’s elitism: if it’s not difficult to read, then it’s not worth the reader’s time. This position, while also being classicist, neglects oral storytelling’s influence on knowledge. (I wonder about Forster’s position on university lectures.) This elitism hasn’t disappeared from modern publishing. In his famous 2001 essay titled The Reader’s Manifesto, B.R. Meyers writes that fast-paced stories written in un-affected prose may be deemed “an excellent read” or a “page-turner,” but “never literature with a capital L.”

The modernist backlash comes on the heels of the Victorian period’s Arthurian resurgence, a shift created by popular writers like Walter Scott, Alfred Tennyson, and William Morris. Tolkien was especially keen on Morris’ romances, stating that “other stories have only scenery; his have geography.” We have Morris to thank (and not sarcastically!) for the creation of Tolkien’s maps, revolutionary at the time of their publication and now staples in nearly every epic fantasy novel. It bears noting that even during their lifetimes, authors like Walter Scott were accused of prettifying history and creating a market for nostalgia. Mark Twain wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court as a reaction to Scott’s writing. Twain writes:

Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by his single might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society. He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote.

I hear protests in the background. “But what about Ursula K Le Guin? What about the Hugo Awards, whose organizers have been keen to diversify the fantasy genre?” That’s exactly it—there’s nothing innate about epic fantasy that requires its marriage to conservative philosophy. (And even Mieville doesn’t believe Tolkien’s influence has been totally negative.) In fact, fantasy is uniquely positioned to play with radical ideas.

Radical, of course, is not the same thing as realistic. In reaction, or perhaps in retaliation, to critics who accuse fantasy of being unrealistic, a sub-genre of fantasy called “grimdark” has emerged featuring grittier and darker storylines. Joe Abercombie, arguably the posterboy of grimdark fantasy, writes “[p]ortraying your fantasy world in a way that’s like our world? That’s only honesty.” Even fantasy that is not officially “grimdark” bears traces of the shift from shiny and clean to gritty and dirty. However, writing recently on the movie Lincoln, Aaron Bady ushers in a glorious takedown of those who equate grittiness with reality.

First and foremost, it uses a realist aesthetic to make it seem like compromising cynicism is realistic. Form becomes content: it shows us the world as it “really” is by adding in the grit and grain and grime that demonstrate that the image has not been airbrushed, cleaned up, or glossed over, and this artificial lack of artifice signifies as reality…They don’t mean “accuracy,” because that’s not something most people could judge; they mean un-glamorized, un-romanticized, dark…

But, of course, we’re not. We’re just seeing a movie whose claim to objective accuracy is no less artificial than the filters by which an instagram takes on the nostalgic glow of a past that was never as overexposed and warm as it has become in retrospect. And when we take “gritty” for “realism,” another kind of “realism” gets quietly implied and imposed: the capitalist realism by which ideals become impossible and the only way things can get done is through compromise and strategic surrender. Anti-romanticism is all the more ideological because it pretends to have no ideology, to be the “plain truth” that demonstrates the falsity of romantic visions.

Whether a story is romantic or gritty is hardly a measure of reality or progress—Game of Thrones is very conservative despite its grittiness, after all. In either case, I’m not sure when novelists started conflating “realistic” with “relevant” or “truthful.” Employing a realistic aesthetic is not something fantasy should necessarily aspire to be, nor does a realistic aesthetic make a novel meaningful. Regardless of literary tradition, most writers are dedicated to sincerely lying. Particularly useful to this discussion is Le Guin’s introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness where she argues that writers “go about it [telling the truth] in a peculiar and devious way…and telling about these fictions in detail and at length…and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That’s the truth!” Generic literary novels also play with the truth, and arguments that literary novels are “realistic,” as though they are not bound by ideological constraints and a particular worldview, are fairly humorous. Epic fantasy is a massive meaningful lie/truth.

In Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, Rosemary Jackson describes fantasy as a “literature of desire” which works to undermine cultural constraints, as a subversive manifestation of the forbidden and taboo, and as an act of imagination that undermines the world. Jackson, of course, also believes that, of all things, The Lord of the Rings is a failed fantasy because it’s sentimental and nostalgic and would rather define the book as a faery romance. However, putting aside the obsession with trying to define epic fantasy (for some academics will insist that there are differences between “high” and “epic” fantasy, while others will tell you that there’s no difference between fantasy and science fiction—drowning in a quagmire is not on my bucket list), Jackson rightfully points out the awesome potential of fantasy to play with the unacceptable.

Tolkien, for his part, argued that fantasy recognizes reality, but didn’t need to be confined by it. “For creative fantasy is founded upon the hard recognition that things are so in the world as it appears under the sun; on a recognition of fact, but not a slavery to it.” Even in conservative-minded fantasies, the opportunity to subvert expectations exists. That’s why, to return to our intrepid NYT reviewer, homogenizing the medieval period as entirely regressive and unconcerned with moral questions is unhelpful and inaccurate.

Chronology is not an indicator of progress. The term medieval is pejorative, often used as a synonym for unenlightened (for what came afterwards?) and anti-intellectual, even though the period’s philosophical contributions still affect us today. If we want to talk about “realistic” warfare, then how can we ignore Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine’s contributions to Just War Theory? Today, we see so-called history used as a slight of hand to give books a carte blanche against criticism. “That’s just how it was back then,” a period defined as anything pre-1950s if judged by fan conversations on the interwebz. Unfortunately, these excuses homogenize history and ignore its radical and not-so-radical thinkers who would protest at, say, the harshness of contemporary life. Who could forget Thomas More’s Utopia, the Renaissance book that birthed the utopian and dystopian novel, subgenres dedicated to undermining the status-quo but, according to the it’s-only-entertainment brigade, born in a period with allegedly unquestionable moral absolutes that cannot be addressed in entertainment. More’s Utopia bends, challenges, and re-imagines the realities of his day more honestly than many fictions claiming objectivity. While most wouldn’t classify Utopia as an epic fantasy work, the point still applies: many imitations of historical time periods aren’t realistic even when they claim to be, but even if they were, what does that have to do with meaning? Literature must do more than imitate.

These subversions also occur in the Arthurian canon, the prototypical conservative epic fantasy. When BBC’s Merlin hired Angel Coulby, a mixed-race actor, to play Guinevere, the fan reaction was divided by those who argued that a black Guinevere couldn’t exist in the medieval period, that her presence was anachronistic, and those who believed that the mere act of casting Coulby was revolutionary. It’s saddening that a medieval text is potentially more progressive than some modern fans who shout down calls for diverse representation. Two Moorish knights were members of the Round Table and, lest we forget, the Green Knight was actually green skinned in early versions of the tale. But here again, we have an erroneous view of the medieval period as disconnected from the rest of the world. Here again we see people use the term “reality” to claim that an idea is objective when it’s actually ideological.

Despite its conservative nature and the fact that it happened “back in the day,” the Arthurian cannon isn’t silent on gender roles either. In 1911, Silence was discovered in England, a 13th century epic poem that forms part of the Arthurian canon and was originally written in French. The main protagonist is Silence, a girl who is raised as a boy due to King Eben’s declaration that women cannot inherit property. Nature and Nurture are personified in the poem, and take turns debating whether gender is either innate or socialized. Can Silence successfully become a man? Though Silence contains a number of problematic elements, the fact that epic fantasy was discussing gender in the 13th century should be enough evidence to dispel the myth that epic fantasy is escapist and unconcerned with the human condition simply because it does not follow our world’s physical laws.

Furthermore, despite commercial tendencies to sideline characters of colour and systemic authorial failures to incorporate people of colour in their work, Gregory Rutledge, writing specifically on African-American literature but also on themes that can be extended to other minority groups, states that the fantastic tradition is perfectly situated to discussing themes of otherness. “Otherness and the otherworld phenomenon of both fantasy and futurist fiction is something with which many persons of African descent may identify. Relegated early to the position of the exotic Other, Africans and their descendants have been marked as primitive for centuries.”

He goes on to relay that while Samuel Delaney could be considered the first self-described African-American speculative fiction author (Delaney eschews the term “fantasy”—but we’re not going there), elements of fantasy nevertheless manifest themselves in African-American literature before Delaney’s debut and even make an appearance in Frederick Douglass’ autobiography. After Douglass was whipped for the first time, he received a root from a fellow slave to evoke spirits to ward off further whippings. Though Douglass unequivocally states that this act was superstitious nonsense, he also admits that no one whipped him ever again. Here we have an example of the fantastic being evoked in discussions of physical freedom, maybe ambivalently by Douglass but with certainty by the fellow slave who offered him the root. Escapist? To paraphrase Terry Prachett, jailers hate escapism.

Even the most formulaic epic fantasy novel plays with the author’s desire, and it is therefore chained by human emotion to the so-called real world–and so it becomes an acceptable target of social criticism or praise. Criticisms targeting epic fantasy’s relevance to the human condition are uncharitable and as the genre gains more traction on television networks, new and old fans are deflecting criticisms of their most entertaining shows by borrowing the old elitist line that fantasy is irrelevant and thus immune from rigorous analysis. We’ve been rather unfair to a genre that can shape reality to its will. Creators do not escape from reality, but bend it to suit a particular idea or agenda and that, for me anyway, has always been the lure of epic fantasy.

*I do not use “ideology” as an insult. Everyone operates through ideology, on both left and right.

About the Author: Sarah is still waiting for her six-figure advance. In the meantime, she acts as a guest lecturer at Chernivtsi National University (that’s in Ukraine) in Canadian Politics. She’ll soon return to Canada –where winter is ALWAYS coming— to begin her PhD at McMaster University. You can follow her on twitter @sarahshoker.

Harry Potter, Race, and British Multiculturalism

Posted on April 2, 2013 by Sarah Shoker

Hagrid’s half-Giant identity is a plot arc in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, so too are the House Elves and Hermione’s crusading, if not paternalistic, attempts to free them from oppression. In the Deathly Hallows the penultimate “other” becomes the mudblood, a term we first hear in Chamber of Secrets. The final book, too, revolves around non-wizarding creatures of, as the Ministry of Magic and Dolores Umbridge put it, “near human intelligence,” and Harry is labelled as a very odd, special, and different wizard by Griphook the Goblin because he treats non-humans with courtesy and respect. The books are dedicated to highlighting the fallacy of “the other” but, and file this under uncomfortable truths, all the human characters of colour are relegated to the sidelines.

JK Rowling has called her books “very British” in a number of interviews, and has even stated that they are a “prolonged argument for tolerance.” However, I can’t help but draw parallels (note: I’m drawing parallels, not determining causality) from her treatment of race and “otherness” in the books to the conversations about multiculturalism and race theory that have occurred throughout British history and continue today.

Rowling has been very explicit about the connection between Pure Blood Wizarding ideology and the Nazism that led to the holocaust. But race theory, the belief that attributes and abilities could be determined by the socially constructed notion of race, was equally dominant in the United Kingdom. Weeding out “undesirables” wasn’t particular to Nazi ideology and was common across Europe.

British identity was partially constructed using internal colonization, where Welsh, Scottish and Irish minorities were subsumed into Britishness, an identity which still remains ambivalent and dynamic. Britishness was also constructed in opposition to a number of external European threats and was only reinforced through colonialism, which was justified by applying race theory.

Even after the Second World War, Great Britain restricted entry to Jewish refugees while simultaneously citing its own tolerance. Jewish bodies were and continue to be racialized, but even though Rowling has been explicit with her works’ connection to the Holocaust, racism is constructed as pureblood witches and wizards versus muggles, mudbloods, and magical creatures.

I’m not the first person to note that the fantasy genre has a history of replacing PoCs with monsters and magical creatures. Writing for Fantasy Book Review, author Lane Heymont states:

…[I]t feels like white authors have an easier time, or are more comfortable, writing from the perspective of dragons, ghosts, elves, Minotaurs, and other non-humans than another human being. Seems ironically odd, don’t you think? And the writing suffers for it, as does the cause.

I target fantasy specifically because I know that Rowling has the ability to write from a PoC’s perspective as evidenced in The Casual Vacancy, but her fantasy works imitate most of the genre: There’s a brilliant ability to create non-human cultures and magic systems, but fantasy novels with people of colour as main characters are sadly rare.

If these books are “very British” and the quintessential “others” in British society are racialized minorities, than why has race been rendered invisible? Whether intentionally or not, side-lining characters of colour matches the British multicultural model that defines racial integration as near invisibility.

Racialiazing “otherness” has been part of the British experience, and Rowling, with her progressive roots, seems to be reacting towards this kind of cruelty by dedicating seven books and several years of her life to combatting it, only to create works that replicate the systemic exclusion of minorities. To clear up any confusion, I’m not saying that Rowling had to talk about how it feels like to be black at Hogwarts, but what it feels like to be Dean Thomas at Hogwarts. (Incidentally, I was disappointed that while Thomas’ backstory was potentially up for inclusion in the official cannon, it eventually had to be axed due to editorial limitations. I look forward to reading more about him in Pottermore.)

As a series that practically begs the reader to take it personally and that has birthed devoted communities and fan conventions, issues of representation and inclusion become incredibly important: fans want to know that they’re allowed in, and if you’re aiming for an emotional reader response, then this is a reaction that should be taken seriously. Further, the exclusion of active people of colour in fiction constitutes a form of erasure that undervalues their construction of and contributions to both fictional and real societies.

As it stands, we know that Hogwarts plays host to a variety of people of colour (Cho Chang, the Patel sisters, Dean Thomas, Blaise Zabini, Kinglsey Shacklebolt etc.) but they are, in a sense, rendered invisible. Their races are so invisible, in fact, that they’ve become model minorities; their races do not detract from their Britishness.

The idea of integration as a key to a successful multicultural policy stems back to the Second World War. British politicians knew, especially after Kristallnacht, what Germany’s Jews were facing, but still worked actively to limit the number of entries into the country. In 1965, Roy Hattersley, a Labour politician argued that “without integration, limitation is inexcusable, without limitation, integration is impossible,” the idea being that immigration should be restricted because it might rile the emotions of British citizens, the same rational for restricting entry to Jewish refugees. Minorities became responsible for the resentment directed towards them.

The subtle casuistry of this linkage of a commitment to “harmonious community relations” to necessary restriction on immigration and immigrants has continued to be employed by successive British governments. It has a wonderfully corrupt, but popularly acceptable rhetorical formula which argues that:

as decent and tolerant people we are naturally opposed to any form of racism or discrimination.
simultaneously, we are committed to a harmonious society.
however; immigrants and ethnic minorities have a capacity to generate racial hostility and discrimination from the majority population.
consequently: in order to guarantee harmonious community relations we must rigorously control immigration.
–Charles Husband, Doing Good by Stealth, Whilst Flirting with Racism: Some Contradictory Dynamics of British Multiculturalism

More recently, government officials stated that the reason the London Bombers carried out the 2005 train attacks was because they were insufficiently integrated into British culture, even though the evidence pointed otherwise, thus starting a firm government push to ensure that Britain’s Muslims were also “well-integrated.”

In 2003, in response to the Labour government’s proposed legislation on asylum seekers, British tabloids exploded with accusations that immigrants were abusing the system and dirtying the country with AIDS, Hepatitis B, and TB. These accusations don’t seem so far off from the hearings held in the Ministry of Magic, where we saw a witch being accused of stealing a wand (stealing from the system) and not being sufficiently magical (British.) While Rowling’s stories may have been inspired by the holocaust, they still play out in Great Britain today. They are indeed “very British” books; Rowling is both prescient and astute when she highlights government and media sanctioned oppression and she’s at her strongest when she writes these scenes.

Only last week The Guardian published a piece by David Goodhart, who accused liberals of favouring a highly-individualistic identity that transcended the boundaries created by the nation state, roughly defining certain liberals as being pro-immigration and therefore anti-community.

This individualistic view of society makes it hard for modern liberals to understand why people object to their communities being changed too rapidly by mass immigration – and what is not understood is easily painted as irrational or racist…If society is just a random collection of individuals, what is there to integrate into? In liberal societies, of course, immigrants do not have to completely abandon their own traditions, but there is such a thing as society, and if newcomers do not make some effort to join in it is harder for existing citizens to see them as part of the “imagined community”. When that happens it weakens the bonds of solidarity and in the long run erodes the “emotional citizenship” required to sustain welfare states.

According to Goodhart, the very presence of immigrants destabilizes allegedly harmonious British communities with resentment (a romanticized fallacy, especially when looking at Britain’s long history of class warfare), their bodies becoming symbols of chaos that disrupt a cohesive national identity. To be a racialized minority is to have people assume that you are unwilling to emotionally integrate into British identity and society. Some conservatives argue that under multiculturalism people will abdicate working together towards a common collective goal known as nation-building; however, the examples above show that Britain’s ideal form of multiculturalism has always been assimilationist.

Rowling is progressive, clearly pro-immigration, and the Harry Potter series illustrate a typical liberal approach to race blindness. Her works still presuppose that integration is synonymous with invisibility, but she also argues for the potential success of Britain’s multicultural model. Their well-integrated and invisible races ensure that Cho Chang, Dean Thomas, and the Patel sisters can be British without disrupting British identity with their racialized bodies. While I appreciated that Cho Chang became a sobbing mess in Order of the Phoenix without her emotional deterioration being tied to her ethnicity, I can’t separate issues of representation from the larger systemic trend found within the fantasy genre. (Cho is the character of colour with the most screen time. One chapter is dedicated to her character in Order of the Phoenix, where she spends most of the time crying, and she receives a few sentences here and there from books 4 to 7. When we meet her, in book 3, she doesn’t say much of anything.) That characters of colour are in the background allow the reader to know that Hogwarts is Very Diverse, but their importance to the plot is minimal. As the very worst possibility, they act as ornaments to Hogwarts’ status as a Very Progressive School.

This integration-as-invisibility approach is distinctly different from the movie adaptations, where the characters of colour wore clothing representative of their ethnic backgrounds to the Yule Ball, whereas the same characters in the books wore dress robes like everyone else. Except…children of immigrants don’t uniformly wear clothing from their parents’ home country. While the Potter books erase ethnic difference, the movies champion essentialism which, to her credit, Rowling can’t be accused of doing.

Rowling spends seven books opining about the importance of diversity, while replicating the systemic sidelining of characters of colour. The characters in the Harry Potters books are proof of multiculturalism’s success, but the structure of the books imitate systematic issues concerning racial representation. There’s tension in this approach: on one hand, it becomes exhausting to have one’s entire identity defined by ethnic background (something we can’t choose) and being able to choose one’s identity through acquired membership (identity markers we can choose, eg. being part of an SF/F fandom) can be a highly liberating experience. On the other hand, if Rowling believes in anti-otherizing, then why isn’t the quintessential British “other” given more screen time, not to discuss race, but to simply be? While a British progressive may envision a rainbow utopia of immigrants and new citizens, we know that their invisibility exists to comfort us while we pat ourselves on the back for being progressive. When it comes to screen time for characters of colour, their stories are still marginalized. The Harry Potter books are in no way the worst offenders in the genre—and I still remain a loyal fan—but there’s a serious cognitive dissonance that needs to be analyzed when a book series extolling the virtues of diversity are not particularly diverse themselves.

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