Easily the best thread I’ve seen about the the most recent fiasco of SFF Twitter is this thread on literary criticism and heterogeneity of marginalized experience by Lee Mandelo. It’s so good that, with Lee’s permission, I’m reproducing it here in its entirety, in case my prayers are someday answered and Twitter actually does burn down and fall into the sea.
Art does not exist to be evaluated on a scale of “harm” to “uplift,” and if we want to talk dog-whistles, that right there is a huge one: it’s deeply anti-intellectual, and it centers a form of toxic individualism that evacuates solidarity/difference in favor of moral purity. Also, relevant from other recent intra-community trans Discourse: the fact that something triggered or hurt you, personally, is real— but that doesn’t actually make it bad, or wrong, or Harmful ™ because you *are not the center of the universe.* Other trans folk who have different experiences of gender and the world might be deeply seen by the art that you think is morally bad and harmful personally.
To some extent, we know why this is common: traumatic stress forces your focus to be survival oriented, internal, and evaluative. It’s hyper-vigilance! However, what it is *not* is healthy or productive— especially when turned relentlessly outward to hold others responsible for your bad feelings as opposed to processing them, or saying “ouch, not for me.” (Which is not to say artists shouldn’t be cognizant of other people’s pain and the larger social implications of their work, so please don’t reduce what I’m saying here to “fuck it, who cares.”)
The other huge flaw with “the story harmed me” or flat harm-critique is the lack of acknowledgement that, if we’re using that metric, then your insistence on the story harming you is EQUALLY harming to the other trans folk for whom the piece was a revelatory story, or productive. It’s powerfully self-centered and not feasibly sustainable. This is where the whole “criticism is an art itself and has theory” thing comes in. Because Sedgwick wrote re: queer theory’s internal failings a long ass time ago about “paranoid” vs “reparative” reading practices.
What we saw here was a classic case of destructive/paranoid readings that (1) FORCIBLY OUTED A TRANS WRITER and (2) caused a lot of misery and stress across the board for everyone… but that stress has been processed unevenly. Paranoid readings are also a valid understandable response to a violent world that seeks to harm us! But they close in on themselves and each other like a fucking bear trap. Reparative readings are open to pain as useful and potential, and are by definition attempting generosity. Generosity in critique MATTERS. And furthermore, here’s where I get mad as hell: direct-effects audience theory has been discarded for like 40 years for a reason, but it HAUNTS twitter discourse like a hideous revenant. This framing of art and culture is very conservative, pretty fucked up, & spooky to someone who does this stuff professionally. If your replies are full of people saying “hell yes this is critical theory RUN AMOK” I want you to think hard about that.
And regarding some subtweets: it is, in fact, some people’s job—a job for which they have trained extensively!—to do critical work. That does not mean your opinion doesn’t matter, but it does mean (as I teach students every semester!!) that when doing heavy lifting with art, perhaps the metric of “who is allowed to speak about rhetoric and discourse” is not *solely* an identity based category. That’s a dangerous game. All of us can read badly, or be missing the background that a piece is speaking from, and being trans is NOT a guarantee against that. I’m exhausted and upset by the idea that we can’t have things that dig into more than 101 level exploration of gender, or our pain and tropes and violence, because it won’t be perfect for Everyone. And a queer woman who has the background to engage with what rhetoric and discourse and criticism do, weighing in specifically on those things, is not out of line— and neither is a trans person speaking to their identity experiences. Both can coexist and be discussed with an ethical approach to critique that is not infuriating.
I’m extremely tired and frankly feel violated by the level of anti-intellectual rhetoric and vitriol that cropped up in this discussion, and I’m not talking about fair critiques of a story’s functions or failure to fulfill those. Shit got personal quick, in unproductive ways. In short: harm-based critique of art sounds reasonable on the surface but its application & implications are intensely problematic and almost impossible to ethically or properly deploy, particularly when applied not to, like, egregious hate speech, but affectively difficult art.
Lee Mandelo
