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@Snowcrash
If you follow the link to his review he clarifies that he’s a twofer:
I took a long time to warm to the usefulness of the word “queer”. I suspect I’m of a similar generation to Greg, though not having come out until college, and not being visibly non-normative probably cut down on having it thrown at me pejoratively. In fact, the biggest reason I was resistant to using it was the meanings it picked up in academia under “queer studies” programs, where its use was often divorced from experiential sexuality entirely.
But I’ve come around to embracing it as a general umbrella term for people with non-normative sexualities or gender identities, and here’s why I find it useful. The various initialisms have the flaw of being enumerative and specific, in a laundry list sort of way. If you have a specific list of included identities, then any identity not specifically included can be considered to be excluded. Conversely, any initialism that includes a specific set of identities, should be reasonably expected to include/be relevant to all of them. And yet neither of these cases is reliably true.
Greg notes that using “queer” as an umbrella term provides some people a convenient way of avoiding mentioning lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender individuals, but my experience is that you’re just as likely to encounter people using the initialism “GLBT” and yet still excluding lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender individuals. This happens regularly in everything from publishing houses to review sites to authors self-describing the scope of their writing. (True story: at Rainbow Con last year, I was chatting with an author who described herself as writing “GLBT fiction”. When I asked about lesbian characters she assured me, “Oh, no, I only write m/m.”)
If someone tells me that they write/publish/review GLBT books and it turns out that they only write/publish/review gay male books, I consider their claim a lie. If they tell me they write/publish/review queer books and it turns out that they only mean gay male books, I consider it less than informative but technically true.
I regularly shorthand my own writing as involving “queer women” because it just gets awkward to list out “lesbian and bisexual women and women in romantic friendships who don’t consider those relationships sexual” or something of the sort.
There is a great usefulness in having a non-specific umbrella term when discussing a group of identities for which there is no unifying set of necessary and sufficient characteristics except “not normative with respect to gender and sexuality”. And while I understand and empathize with those for whom the word “queer” carrie a painful baggage, the scope of its semantics makes it ideal for that sense of non-normativity. It has never meant only one specific defined aspect of sexuality or gender and thus doesn’t have the specificity or exclusionary problems of the laundry-list identifiers.
Over the years, I’ve come to understand the term “queer” meaning “not strictly hetero.” I actually only came to understand this was controversial within the LGBTQ world when Greg mentioned it some while back. Since then, I’ve been trying to be careful about when I use it, particularly as I am a straight, cis, white male. What’s kind of funny, maybe, is that it took me years to actually use the word, understanding it to mean “subcultures that don’t embrace heteronormativity”, because where I grew up, it was a nasty slur against homosexuals. I think a lot of people in their 30s and younger out here (SF Bay Area) just take it to have been subverted to mean LGBTQ. I’m not sure of that, though. Regardless, it’s not worth it at all for me to use the term if it bums anyone out.
@Harold Osler: Oh wow, there’s a good (bad) one. IMHO despite arguable success reclaiming “queer” (though it still sounds…off to me to hear it from a non-GLBT person use it, so I don’t know how this is truly reclaiming), I don’t feel like “faggot” has been reclaimed at all. That still sounds insulting to me even from the mouth of a LGBT person. And I’m fine with that, even glad; I’m not big into “reclaiming.” 😉
But that’s just me, so take with a grain of salt.
@kathodus: It occurs to me I should clarify that while I really don’t like “queer,” I’m very used to it, and it doesn’t bother me to hear or see it – it’s all over the freaking place. Versus, say, “faggot,” which I really don’t feel like I ever hear used in a complimentary way, so hearing/seeing it (outside chats like this) does bother me.
Again – just my personal take on these things, take with salt, etc.
/ramble, sorry
ETA: P.S. @Harold Osler & @Heather Rose Jones: Yeah there are some definite problems with both GLBT/LGBT and “queer” as blanket works. Plus as we see here, within and between cultures, something like “queer” has varying meanings anyway (it’s really a very vague word).
The sequel to Ninefox Gambit has a page on Goodreads. I went straight to Amazon to see if I could preorder but it doesn’t seem to be available there yet. 🙁
Ita wrote: “I chatted with an older, grizzled man in the consuite at WorldCon. […] Then he raved about the works of Declann Finn. He had all of his works, DF didn’t write fast enough, he wrote compelling stories, etc. At first I thought he was pulling my leg, but he wasn’t. He seemed quite pleasant and nice, so I was, too.”
Heh. I remember back about 1980 talking with another fan about my own age (mid-20’s). He went on a long enthusiastic riff about his favorite writer, who he couldn’t praise enough. The imagination! The creativity! The world-building! The originality!
He was talking about Lin Carter.
(I’ll always reserve a Big Bag O’ Love for Lin Carter’s editorship of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy line, but if there’s a poster child for writers who spend their career trying to ape or imitate better-known — and better — writers, Lin Carter is it.)
@Kendall – The main places I hear/use the word “queer” are regarding eg “queer-friendly venues” for a DIY venue that is considered a safe place for people who don’t care about “passing”, or suchlike. Thinking about it, I guess that’s easier than saying LGBTQ-friendly. I would never, for instance, use the phrase “he/she is queer*.” But the “f” word, yeah. I hope I have purged myself entirely of that.
* Unless I were referencing Tolkien’s parochial Hobbits, who described everyone slightly less conservative than themselves that way, and even then, I would be leery of saying that in public, where it could be misunderstood.
My guess is that people have been thinking the Puppies are much younger than they are is because they seem to have no knowledge of older works in the field. Their knowledge of the Golden Age seems to be up there with the kids in James Nicolls’ series.
Either that, or “the golden age of SF is 12” and their maturity level when talking with/about anyone who isn’t in lockstep with them, or in taking responsibility for their own actions seems about that.
<1-quarter-tongue-in-cheek>
Could it be the Puppies are mostly making claims about their taste in literature as a kind of virtue signalling, and don’t actually read all the much, or care all that much about reading?
</1-quarter-tongue-in-cheek>
Haven’t finished reading the comments, but I have to speak up about “flyover country.”
I’ve spent essentially my whole life in New England, most of it in the Greater Boston area. I’ve never, ever heard the phrase in ordinary, unironic conversation. I have heard it from people scolding or mocking me, as part of that Very Annoying Collective, those Snobby People in the Urban Coastal areas, for thinking of Those States that way. Mostly in the media, sometimes in person.
And, of course, during a couple of memorable visits to Wisconsin and Minnesota, from people who sincerely believed they were being altogether polite, friendly, and welcoming, but who took it for granted that I thought of their states as “flyover country” and genuinely saw no reason at all not to refer to this “fact” while explaining to me that I was going to have a wonderful time anyway.
So, at this point, fuck anyone who wants to lecture me about the importance of not using or thinking a phrase that I wouldn’t even know had it been left to those of my family, friends, and colleagues who were/are Evil Awful Snide Snobby native New Englanders to tell me about it.
As far as I can tell from my experience, “flyover country” is a phrase Midwesterners use when talking about their region to people from the coasts whom they want to make feel guilty or inferior.
And I never, ever have an opportunity to tell them off about it because it will just confirm their own worst prejudices about us Awful Coastal Types, to the disadvantage of any ‘coasters they encounter subsequently.
@kathodus
Ah. Well, I guess they both don’t quite understand the distinction between censorship and editing then.
Woah, baby. It looks like those of us who attended MAC II in Kansas City narrowly dodged a bullet.
My experience with the term “flyover country” is just like Lis Carey’s. I first read it from a Midwesterner bitterly complaining that coastal types thought of his region that way over twenty years ago and I am not sure I have ever seen it used by anyone in any other way to this day. And I am pretty sure I have never heard it in conversation except this one time when somebody was explaining what it meant to a baffled audience of Californians who had never heard of the concept.
I won’t deny there’s cultural mistrust and some condescension here for–pretty much everybody–but I don’t think you’d easily find someone on this coast who was that dismissive of the Midwest.
My experience in the SF Bay Area is that people are very dismissive of the Midwest. I am absolutely not saying that as someone who sympathizes with the politics of my home state or home town, but in my experience, at least post-GW Bush, there is a lot of contempt for Midwesterners in Coastal areas. Like I’ve said before, I’ve struggled trying to get rid of that attitude in myself, so maybe I am drawn to people with that attitude, but I really do have a hard time imagining that people from X region are totally cool with people from Y region. I mean, Northern Californians vs. Southern Californians, or Central Valley Californians vs. Coastal Californians – surely no one would deny those schisms exist?
In my home state, people from Northern Indiana (my birthplace) thought people from Southern Indiana were pathetic hicks; people from Southern Indiana (where I went to college) thought people from Kentucky were pathetic hicks. This is my understanding of the human condition.
Condescension and dismissiveness are not the same. One is about thinking you’re more with-it than the other people: the other is about thinking the other people count for nothing. Which is definitely not the case for Californians. We know very well that almost every other kind of American counts for more, politically: their votes are weighted heavier than ours, they are represented more densely in Congress, their votes are more aggressively courted in federal elections, and their problems are considered to be more real in public discourse.
Californians do tend to be stuck-up in several ways and to overly value their own contributions to culture and politics and to suspect that everything of value probably finds its origin or highest expression in California. We get uncomfortable when we find that a community outside of California is “ahead” of us in some measure or another. But that’s not “dismissive.”
And I think the condescension is more overt in Californians whose origins are in those places. The ones who like to talk about “escaping” them and how they are so grateful for this or that thing they have here & didn’t have or didn’t think they had there–they project on to their former homes as a whole, the conditions they tried to leave behind which belonged to their particular lives.
Kathdus, I can honestly and sincerely say that 90% of my exasperation with midwesterners comes from two things.
1. The utter certainty that I think of their part of the country as “flyover country” and I need to be told not to use this phrase that I really hear only from them.
2. Their equally utter certainty that they are the living, breathing embodiment of Nice, and that people from my part of the country, New England, especially my part of my state, Greater Boston, are the embodiment, the very definition, of Rude.
And that therefore they are complimenting me, and I will be flattered to hear it, when they tell me that I’m nice, not like most New Englanders.
Have they met most New Englanders? Have they met any significant number of New Englanders? Heck, often they haven’t met any New Englanders, at least not to know they had.
Even when I meet them in New England, when actually asked, with gentle concern, if they’ve had many bad experiences, the response is generally a look of confusion and the revelation that, no, really, they hadn’t had any, a fact that hadn’t struck them till I asked.
Special bonus booby prize to the guy who told me in all sincerity that I must not be native to the area, because I was so nice.
He didn’t have a good answer to that question, either.
I don’t think it occurred to him that I might be insulted.
So, to sum up, what I dislike about midwesterners is their smug, unfalsifiable belief in their own ineffable Niceness, and their casual rudeness, certainly to people from my part of the country, but probably to everyone not a midwesterner.
Probably not a perspective you’ve heard before.
OK, thing that confuses me about that puppy gleefully striking out the filthy un people.
He’s not listing Fifth Season as a Best Fantasy candidate. I remember we thought it a little odd that it had qualified in two categories, but if it was different people nominating, that seemed to fit the rules as quoted.
The awards web site of course says damn all about the nominees.
Puppy error, or have they adjusted the candidates after I voted?
Kendall:
No. It would be the equivalent of GLBTQ/LGBTQ. LGBT/GLBT is still stuck in binary thinking.
On-topic, right now I’m listening to Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance, where he talks about growing up in the Rust Belt, and eventually making it to Harvard.
I’m finding it a very powerful book. It’s an insider view on a culture that’s very foreign to me, and suffers from being out-of-sight, out-of-mind. The dynamics of living in a washed-up company town, or of economic shifts leaving your entire society high and dry, aren’t entirely new to me, but they’re portrayed vividly and painfully – while also not sparing on criticism and sharp observations.
I recommend highly.
nickpheas: OK, thing that confuses me about that puppy gleefully striking out the filthy un people. He’s not listing Fifth Season as a Best Fantasy candidate.
Declan Finn’s list was also missing some finalists. I think that this is because one or more Puppies was running the awards, and privately disseminated the list of finalists to their Puppy buddies. Then the DragonCon chairs got hold of the finalist list that the Puppy admins had produced, said “um, NO”, and used their overriding authority to add a few choice finalists to expand what was a somewhat insular list, in an attempt to protect the reputation of the con as the sponsor of the awards.
Bear in mind that this is pure speculation on my part, but numerous random pieces of evidence have built this picture for me.
@nickpheas: I think he based it off Declan Finn’s list, which also had only 5 fantasy nominees. I think Finn was the first to post the list of nominees, and he said he was puzzled there were only 5 in the Best Fantasy category – so I think Jemisin and the other author were added a bit later by the DragonCon admins. Probably a minor goof-up.
ETA: Ninja’d by JJ
@Lis Carey, no, I have definitely heard that perspective, and I completely agree! I have heard that from my own mouth. I often find Midwestern friendliness to be offensively shallow and false. I mean, not always, but that general air of polite friendliness, while at the same time judging you because you’re an outsider – “They’re nice people. They’re… different” was a common description I heard growing up for anyone not utterly and completely OF my hometown. It’s so insanely parochial, and I feel like it’s how people like Trump can rise to power.
I’ll admit I was a little surprised, given the stereotypes I grew up with (reinforced by movies), the first time I visited NYC, to discover that the people in New York are some of the nicest (honestly nice, not necessarily polite) people I’d met. By the time I made it to Baltimore and Providence (the other two places I’ve spent any time at on the East Coast), I was no longer surprised. Seriously. I have wandered into a neighborhood bar in Baltimore, in Brooklyn, and been immediately welcomed with open arms, once it was obvious I wasn’t being a jerk.
My partner is from NYC, and she loves Boston, but I’ve never been there. But if she loves a city, that’s a pretty good indication it’s a good place to be.
Maybe my post earlier would have been better as a private conversation between Aaron and I – two Midwesterners who harbor no love for the regionalism and smugness of their birthplaces. I am personally not at all offended when people talk about flyover states. I am trying to be less bitter about my origins, and that’s what I was referencing in my initial post. My feelings about this are complicated and involve cognitive dissonance between my love of my family and the often horrible things they vote to uphold.
@Lucy Kemnitzer
I’ve lived in California, in the Bay Area, now for almost half my life. I’m 43, and I’ve been here since ’95. I love it. I particularly feel this is true, and I’m guilty of it:
You only have to go about an hour outside of Oakland to find the same environment in which I grew up, in Indiana.
Oh, come to think of it, there’s no wonder why “Queer” is so uncontroversial in Sweden. It has never been used as a slur here, for that we have native words.
kathodus: Aaron and I – two Midwesterners who harbor no love for the regionalism and smugness of their birthplaces.
I’m a third on that list. I grew up around people who valued and spent money on shiny toys they couldn’t afford instead of providing necessities for their children, who thought school was a waste of time, and who thought possession of a gun was far superior to possession of an intellect and rationality.
You know the saying “big people talk about ideas, average people talk about things, little people talk about other people”? Most of the people where I grew up fell into the latter two categories.
Honestly, most of the kids in my high school deliberately scheduled themselves for as few classes and as many study halls as they could get away with. I was the only one in my year who took Chemistry and Physics, one of 3 who took advanced mathematics, one of 2 who took Biology II. My town was too small — 2,000 people — to have Advanced Placement courses; all the classes went at the pace of the slowest people in the class.
I was harassed and bullied continually from kindergarten through graduation because I was smart and cared about school, in a town where only the jocks were valued (there was no such thing as “My kid made honor roll” bumper stickers in my day). The only reason I’m still alive today was because I had SFF books in which to escape the utter misery of my life.
Not surprisingly, these are the same people whose Facebook walls are now covered in racist, misogynist, and homophobic “jokes” and slurs, comments on subjects about which they are completely ignorant, and memes spreading utter falsehoods about political figures. I know this, because I chose to accept Friend requests from many of these people out of courtesy — because, after all, my life is pretty great now, and they’re still stuck in that small town with their small minds, so what the hell, I can afford to give them that kindness. Let me tell you, it’s really something to see one of the biggest bullies of me complaining repeatedly on Facebook about how their child is being bullied in school. I mean, I just can’t even at their cognitive dissonance.
Needless to say, I got the hell out of Dodge the moment I graduated from high school and never looked back.
So, yes, I have a lot of bad feelings toward people from rural areas who sneer at those with an education, at those who care about the environment, at those who care enough about other people enough to pay extra taxes to provide health care and education and survival to people who are struggling; toward people who are too ignorant to actually find out the facts and just keep repeating racist, sexist, hateful bullshit that’s been told to them, because that’s what they want to believe.
No, I’m sure that not everyone in rural areas is like that. I know people from rural areas who aren’t like that. Which is why I’m trying really hard to let go of the negative feelings I have about the people who live in those places.
It will be a lifelong project for me. 😐
Flyover vs non flyover.
I was born and for the first 30 years of my life, lived in NYC (Staten Island to be precise). I grokked and embodied that famous New Yorker cover of the New Yorker’s view of the world, with just a few minor changes. I started my change as I slowly started to travel and explore. Living in Orange county in 2002-3 gave me a Californian view of things
And then I moved to Minnesota, and more so, began to travel in the Midwest and the areas adjacent. There definitely is a “heartland” or “flyover” sort of pride here, the coasts are in some ways a foreign country.
I’ve met people around the country as we traveled a lot as kids. Dad got 4-6 week vacations as he was a charmer and good negotiator. Some were nice, some were jerks. Just because a couple people in one area were similar in behavior didn’t lead me to believe all were. I usually met others in the same town or a couple towns over who weren’t.
Stereotyping is why it’s so hard to stamp out racist, sexist, and other *ist behavior even when we want to be doing the right thing. The more we are aware of and fighting stereotyping of people the better we’ll do at treating all human beings with the respect and equal dignity, rights, privileges they deserve.
@kathodus
I get that impression as well, since a lot of the claims they make about the golden age and how SFF used to be just don’t match reality. Also witness the Appendix N guy lamenting the alleged erasure of classic SFF most of us read twenty, thirty or forty years ago, but which he somehow managed to miss.
Regarding regional rivalries, this sort of thing happens everywhere. If flyover country is an insult rather than just a stupid term, try getting “fishhead” some time.
Interestingly, I’ve had Americans warning me or pitying me about spending time in the Deep South (“You lived in Mississippi? How horrible!”), New York (“They’re so rude”) or New England (“They’re rude and snobby”). Meanwhile, I found lovely people in all of those places.
I get what JJ, kathodus and others are saying about rural provincialism. I grew up in a rural village that was slowly getting swallowed up by the suburbs of a bigger city and know those “never look beyond your own fence” attitudes only too well. As a teenager who had seen more of the world due to a parents whose job required a lot of travelling those attitudes were stifling, which is why I literally cannot comprehend people who lament the good old days before there were all those foreigners. Because honestly, do they remember what it was like, how stifling and limiting it was?
In fact, the only reason I still live in the area (apart from elderly parents) is that with the internet, Amazon, streaming video, etc… I am no longer limited to what the local people are interested in.
I’m British and the term flyover country had very different connotations to me. I’m a little disappoined to be enlightened.
I pictured somthing like Spaghetti Junction in our industrial heartland but lots more over the geographical area. Why you would fill up endless plains with complex road systems was a puzzle, but, each to their own.
It helps to know that a UK flyover is a US overpass.
Doire–
Two countries divided by [the illusion of] a common language. 😀
I grew up on the West Coast, lived in multiple places there, including a proverbially liberal city, and never heard the term “flyover country.” In general we were busy enough in our own lives that we didn’t sit around making up dismissive terms for people living in the middle of the continent.
“Flyover Country,” like “Wrongfans,” is a term invented by a member of the group it describes to encapsulate the way he believed outsiders thought of that group.
Also I will say I read Maggie’s LJ and occasionally comment there, and I do not find it a particularly safe space. I have had commenters there accuse me of mental illness, of being abused by my parents, of considering children less than human. I have expressed fear of letting my neighbors know I’m an atheist and have been treated as if I had written an insult. Nobody there stepped in on my behalf.
I understand that Maggie and her conservative friends are, even with good will toward differing viewpoints, less likely to notice aggression when it is not directed at them. However, one would think they’d be willing to accept that liberals have similar limitations in noticing aggression not directed at us, and therefore assuming zero good will on our part might not be called for.
I will say that because of Maggie, I am more likely to notice when someone makes “conservatives should die in a fire” comments–more likely to feel a “I should speak up” twinge. I think that is not good enough, but I’m still working on how to translate that twinge to action.
There’s one prime example of flyover country as a concept, though not the phrase, in one of the great works of the late last century: On the Talking Heads’ More Songs About Buildings And Food, the song “The Big Country” goes through a detailed description and ends with a sharp putdown.
I moved away in the late ’80s, but am a fourth generation Californian and the term “flyover country” was one that had to be explained to me about a decade ago. I’m still a little unclear as to what is and is not included (no, don’t enlighten me). My very few trips east of Colorado and west of Virginia have been brief and uneventful, but I’ve spent quite a lot of time in both Massachusetts and New York and have had nothing but lovely, friendly interactions with people I was told would be rude.
@Cat – I understand that Maggie and her conservative friends are, even with good will toward differing viewpoints, less likely to notice aggression when it is not directed at them. However, one would think they’d be willing to accept that liberals have similar limitations in noticing aggression not directed at us, and therefore assuming zero good will on our part might not be called for.
When I read Maggie’s LJ, my first thought was to wonder if Truesdale would characterize that as pearl clutching or if that’s something he doesn’t recognize in those he might view as more like himself. In a similar vein, I noticed there was a safe space for Puppies at Worldcon, which I think is a lovely idea and also a little ironic given some of the rhetoric.
I wonder what it would take for a significant number of people of all stripes and beliefs to extend civility and empathy to others, along with an awareness that we are most sensitive to that which is directed at us and least sensitive to that which gets pointy at them (whoever them and us might be)?
With the important difference that my volunteers are curious about the Golden Age. I am the means by which they are exploring it.
Mikayla is part of an SF podcast crew but their focus is on recent material. And why wouldn’t it be?
Maggie’s a buddy of mine, so I’m fighting my urge to charge in with guns blazing here–let me see if I can say something useful instead. (And Cat, I’m very sorry you had that experience there–that’s dreadful!)
One discussion I found very useful in the last few years was that, indeed, we tend not to notice slurs against our political opposites the same way we notice our own. And fandom swings wildly left, enough that the conservative contingent is recognized as a contingent, not as just…y’know…everybody.
So if you figure that even a small chunk of fandom is prone to talk politics, and that those people are evenly distributed across the political spectrum, I, as card-carrying liberal, might notice maybe 10% of the vitriol whereas somebody on the other end might notice 90%. (I’m pulling these numbers out of orifices for ease of math here, not attempting a scientific breakdown of political life in fandom, but presumably it is much higher on t’other side from me.)
Ten percent (or whatever) I can roll my eyes and walk away from, ninety percent is all around you, and you might start to feel pretty defensive pretty quick.
There are those who exist in a state of permanent offense, of course, and who would take “the weather’s hot today,” as a savage attack–I can think of a few Puppy leaders in that direction–but I think even people of goodwill would get their backs up after awhile, particularly if their friends (like yours truly) don’t even hear what’s hitting them most of the time.
New thread
@Red Wombat – Maggie’s a buddy of mine, so I’m fighting my urge to charge in with guns blazing here
Um, I hope I didn’t help excite that urge. I actually feel terrible for her, because feeling attacked sucks, as does feeling outnumbered and marginalized. Wherever we stand on the political spectrum, we have more in common than not and whether we find the ideas of others inimical or not, it is never out of place to recognize our shared humanity and act accordingly. In other words, Golden Rule all the way down and around.
Not from my perspective.
(A Canadian perspective. A “once had to deal with an Anti-Imperialist Alliance scrutineer at a polling station” perspective)
A random parallelism that might shed light on Californians and the term “flyover country”.
Back a decade or so ago, I had the occasion and opportunity to attend the Winnipeg Folk Festival in company with a Canadian friend who lived locally to the festival. Among all the banter and joking involved in introducing the acts and talking about specific songs, there was a lot of frustrated-but-mostly-friendly mocking of the USA and US residents. At one point my friend turned to me and apologized for the superficially anti-USA feel to a lot of the humor and said something to the effect of, “I bet you folks say similar things about Canada.”
I, somewhat embarrassedly, informed her that people in the USA rarely thought about Canada at all.
I didn’t know that. With a little digging I found this National Geographic story that credits the phrase to Thomas McGuane in 1980:
Since we’re talking about language that insults along an urban/rural divide, does anyone else hate the term “white trash”? Here in the South it’s used quite a bit and doesn’t draw the same opprobrium as other racial insults.
Everyone has a right to be cranky now and then, and I think women in particular need to claim and be granted space to be cranky, because the general culture tends to deny it.
I’ve been following Maggie’s blog for several years and support her on Patreon, but I will admit I go through phases when I kind of skim the main articles. And my reading of the comments is pretty sporadic. I can see someone trying the blog during one of the periods when I was skimming and bouncing hard.
I find I also need to be careful about which pieces of her fiction I read. Sometimes the sado-masochism gets a bit heavy for my tastes (or, annoyingly, crops up in or crosses over into a series I had been enjoying). I can see people bouncing from some of those serials too, especially if they similarly don’t like (or aren’t used to) some of the Romance tropes she riffs off of.
Cheryl, thanks. It’s ok, though–discomfort’s useful sometimes. Honestly, if I didn’t declare friendship in the face of hostility from people I respect and admire, I’d feel like a pretty crap friend. I can look myself in the eye another day, so it’s all good.
Mmm. “White trash” makes me uncomfortable as an out-term–“it’s nothing but white trash in that town”–but I myself, and many friends, use variations to describe ourselves and our relatives all the time–“third generation trailer trash” and so forth. Which we get to do, because it’s OUR kin, and we know damn well what they were–my mom was the first one to go to college in a long time, we were absolutely white trash, so we get to call ourselves that if we want.
Which falls into a long history of the terms we can call ourselves but other people can’t call us, I suppose.
White trash is interesting, unlike many other slurs, in that it’s something you can cease to be. My mother got a MFA, I’m a financially stable children’s book author who worries about local food and the plight of endangered butterflies, my buddy Carlota, from the depths of rural Alabama, works at a high powered tech company and travels the world between Singapore, Stuttgart, & Sydney. Nobody would think to call us trash now, even if I did grow up in a double-wide, sleeping under the table for a year or two because we didn’t have an extra bedroom.
Where I’m from is probably near where Kathodus is from and I’ve had similar experiences. I’ve also had people from the East Coast (who clearly meant well) tell me what a horrible place I’m from and exclaim that I must be so happy to not be there (this was while I wasn’t living there).
Having said that, I have no misconceptions about Midwestern niceness. People are nice if they think you belong and can be standoffish if they think you’re an outsider.
I will say, though, that I know a fair amount of Midwesterner’s who will joke about being part of Flyover Country in a way that is very self-depreciating. Even if folks from the various coasts haven’t specifically used that phrase, there is the perception that they see where we live (and us) as boring, provincial, and sometimes even stupid. There are folks from grad school who don’t understand how I could choose to live in the Midwest.
Generally, I shrug all of this off. However, I also understand why it upsets some people.
On-topic, right now I’m listening to Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance
I’d recommend reading this, also, for some other views. (Including that the book is more wish than reality.)
I don’t know how I feel about the term “white trash.” My mother lived in a double wide for about 10 years, three of my siblings are meth addicts (two are in recovery) and the first generation to graduate college was the one after mine. My father was and is a big fan of books, but after my parents separated, I was the only one reading something other than Reader’s Digest. If we weren’t Westerners, I’m pretty sure I would have grown up thinking of myself as white trash, which probably would have felt harder to climb out of than working class, which has always felt more about occupation than a social stratum.
Legit jealous of you swells who grew up in a double-wide. We could only afford a 10′-wide mobile home for a few years. OTOH, my grandfather had a red raspberry patch next to it that was as long and wide as the trailer itself, so that part was good.
P J: Thanks for that!
Talk about a counterpoint 😛
I’m really enjoying Hillbilly Elegy, but it makes sense that it’s less representative than it might seem. Means there’s much, much more for me to wrap my head around, which I hope is a good realization to reach. 🙂
@JJ – Sound like we had some similar experiences growing up.
Interesting to find out the term flyover country was coined by someone from flyover country. One of the common traits of the region I grew up around is a dry, self-deprecating sense of humor. That’s what I look forward to when visiting there. It seems like the Culture Wars rubbed everyone’s nerves raw.
@RedWombat
I’m sorry; I know it is hard to hear a friend criticized. And Maggie is really quite a nice person most of the time. I haven’t dropped her from my friends list; I value her insights and I still read most of what she has to say. But I don’t comment there–or at least not with anything that might be challenging for them–unless I’m braced for unpleasantness. And I think my experiences are a reasonable point of information for people who are thinking about what she has written.
In general, re the term “white trash” or “trailer trash.”
People can use terms about themselves that outsiders had better stay the heck away from, and I think of “white trash” as one such term.
On “conservatives should die in a fire”: an acquaintance died in a fire and since then I cringe whenever I hear it. Also my dad votes Tory. So do my sister and brother-in-law. Or was it only US conservatives who should be immolated? I would like to think that I’d have the courage to call out something like that, even coming from my own “tribe”.
I try real hard to not wish death or bodily harm on people, even in my rantiest inner monologues. Certainly not as a “joke” in public. That’s Not Cool.
@Heather Rose Jones:
Canadians have a complicated relationship with the United States. Much of our media is still made and set in the US, and I think we have trouble carving out our own identity that isn’t related to snow or hockey or beer. So we’re a bit defensive and/or self-deprecating in an attempt to define ourselves as Not-American. At least that’s been my view from Southern Ontario.
@James Nicoll
From my European perspective neither.
Even if you exclude support for nuclear power (which would be a far right political opinion in Germany, even the conservatives are against nuclear power now), a lot of those supposedly so leftist SFF folks don’t strike me as particularly far left. e.g. John Scalzi, the puppies’ poster boy leftist hate figure, sounds a lot like moderate conservatives in Germany.
This is also why I’m a bit wary of Americans who self-define as conservative, because “conservative” in the US all too often means far right fringe in Germany.
Which is no reason to insult MCA Hogarth or anybody else.