When am I going to learn to stop reading meta?

[cashew]

Sometimes, when I stumble across meta I disagree with, I'm hit with the urge to shout back. So instead of leaving comments in a conversation I don't really want to be having, I'm making a dreamwidth entry to dump my thoughts so they can go away and I can read my trashy mysteries in peace.

BL is problematic because it doesn't portray gay sex in a healthy way VS People are always overly critical of women's literature and BL is staunchly women's literature

Both can be true simultaneously and it's like...this isn't unique to BL? You think cis-het romance is somehow free of problems? You think works targeting other demographics, in general, aren't being overscrutinized?

I'm seriously getting tired of the problem being constantly framed as "look at this minority group's needs being ignored". It's very valid and I'm not saying it doesn't bear repeating.

I'm just personally tired of the same points getting repeated ad nauseum by every new generation of fandom influx who have to beat the horse of my chosen genre of entertainment. I'm especially fucking tired of people trying to tell me that preferring one genre is somehow "problematic".

Here's a new thought: people don't pick their entertainment to be educated. People pick their entertainment to be entertained, and that means all the social biases that comes with being born into a particular society. Trying to get people to be more "aware" about their entertainment consumption as a form of activism is pointless.

If you want to make a difference politically, then go engage with politics. If you just want to engage in intellectual analysis, realize that literary criticism isn't gonna do anything to move the political needle. It's only good for breaking down the various social factors that goes into shaping our literature, but in terms of activism? It does exactly nothing.

If academic exercises actually had political impact, we'd be in a much better place.

So stop trying to tell women how they should read. Let them read their trashy romances, het or BL or otherwise. Let them be picky. Let them be problematic. Stop trying to expand their horizons or control their choices. Sure, make recommendations, but leave it at that. They can damn well decide whether they want to follow your recs for themselves. Stop trying to shame women into consuming a genre they're not interested in consuming. Stop trying to shame women into abandoning a genre they enjoy.

But most importantly, stop couching your activism as academic analysis. Academic analysis requires a nuance that works against political activism and vice versa. The two goals are incompatible.

Comments

[bluapapilio]

You worded this perfectly.

[labingi]

Here via bluapapilio. I enjoyed this, and I totally agree with you about being tired of the policing of "problematic" media. It's such a weird place to arrive from fandom roots where (mostly) women turned to fan community so that they could share "kinks" in peace without shaming.

I do disagree about whether lit crit affects society. I think you can draw a pretty straight line from socially engaged literary criticism (ex. New Historicism, feminist, queer, race theory, etc.) to less rigorous pop meta in the early 2000s (LJ, etc.) to policing of tropes, from Racefail through to the rise of, for want of a better term, "wokeness," which has become a national issue and certainly impacted the US election.

Or maybe I just want to believe that poets really are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. :-)

[cashew]

I think you can draw a pretty straight line from socially engaged literary criticism (ex. New Historicism, feminist, queer, race theory, etc.) to less rigorous pop meta in the early 2000s (LJ, etc.) to policing of tropes, from Racefail through to the rise of, for want of a better term, "wokeness,"

I think all the examples you've listed are still very much limited to the realm of academia. While academic discussions might inspire political activists to use those ideas, going from academic discussion to actual policy changes (such as universal suffrage) is a long twisted path tread by politicians, political activists, interest groups, etc. Some academics manage to successfully straddle academia and political activism; but most academics don't. Trying to demonstrate something as "more progressive" to encourage a shift in behavior is a futile effort because while a minority of people might be convinced by such an argument the vast majority will not.

While academics are certainly just as prone to being swept up in political activism, because humans are social animals, that's the effect of politics, not academia. Since academia values factual discussion over political correctness and efficiency, it results in a lot of nuanced discussions/arguments that chokes political passion/fervor, the necessary ingredient to generate political engagement en masse that can lead to political change.

The basis of good academia is a willingness to argue against and criticize people "on your side" as it were. This is a terrible approach to generating political support for a policy change. Yet any academic who is not willing to tear their own pet theories apart in pursuit of expanding knowledge is not being intellectually honest.

So yes, academia can serve as an instrument of political activism, but the academics' methodology does not effectively wield said tool in a way that can generate policy changes. Hence my point of why literary criticism, an academic methodology, doesn't lead to any meaningful political change.

[labingi]

Good point that nuanced reasoned argument doesn't really work as activist polemic.