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Own Voices, “Trickster,” and Some Things to Think About
The #ownvoices movement has been important in publishing and entertainment. On the whole, it is a good thing. Yes, we absolutely want to highlight and promote works written by marginalized people about marginalized people. The amazing work currently being done in Afrofuturism (N.K. Jemisin, Tomi Adeyemi, Nnedi Okorafor and others), queer fiction (Tamsyn Muir, Rivers Solomon, Charlie Jane Anders and others) and in many other areas. (Note that I am using queer here as the umbrella form; I realize some people don’t like it, but it is more inclusive than the alphabet soup).
But, like all good things, it has its bad and painful elements. One of them is the idea that only marginalized people can write marginalized characters. This has a couple of issues, the first being that it tells straight, white, cis people they can only write about straight people (and then when they do they get criticized). The other is that marginalized people are often pressured only to write about marginalized people. I spoke a few years ago to an Asian-American comic artist who was tired of being constantly put on the “Asian books.” I’ve personally felt a slight pressure to write only about bisexual characters. (Although most of my characters are bi, some are straight, some are gay, some are asexual…)