i keep saying i'll have more cogent things to say about this, but till then...

[fictional]

Check out deepad's post, I Didn't Dream of Dragons, a thoughtful, lucid, poignant essay on race and reading fantasy.

Excerpt from my comment:

But here is my problem, and that problem is love. Brought up on a steady diet of white fantasy and British boarding school novels, now, even when I can identify the alienation imposed by them -- these are stories by people who think of me as sub-human -- I still love them. They are still the fabric of my childhood, the patterns of my inner landscape. It's like Stockholm Syndrome.

And I still don't know what to do with that? How does one cope with the politics of desire?

Comments

[kalichan.livejournal.com]

I also think of this in regard to the fact that we like to think of ourselves as good people, with a predilection towards the stories of villains.

Somehow it seems part of the same problem. Is it a love of transgression for its own sake, as you suggest?

Maybe it's not even a problem. I don't know.

[rm.livejournal.com]

I hope it's not love of transgression for its own sake. It doesn't _feel_ like it, but I suspect that it may be, not because ooo, trangression, fun to be shocking, but because desire is in part a function of discomfort.

The most powerful line in the essay you originally cited was "I grew up with half a tongue" and it's there to make a very specific cultural point, that I really don't want to take away from with my digression, but when it comes to the language of desire -- isn't it that we all have half a tongue, at least in a society that is all about punishing desire both cultural and sexual? Certainly, that's where this discussion meanders ("what desire is acceptable") further down-thread.

[kalichan.livejournal.com]

desire is in part a function of discomfort.

No, I completely agree. Actually, it's kind of shocking to me, how many things are a product of discomfort. In terms of genres, I realized recently that laughter/comedy also stems from that same place as horror; those gut places from where we instinctively retreat.

I loved the "I grew up with half a tongue."

I think about that often. I remember speaking with my dad about it; his regret that I have no mother tongue; the first language I spoke, the one whose patterns are ingrained into my brain is not the language I am now most comfortable with, and I do not read or write it fluently. It's a thought I find alarming. But you're right in that, the language of desire is that way for all of this society.

*laughs* how sad.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Well, to bring it back to a Torchwood discussion for you and I -- I see a lot of people, when they try to suss out the world Jack is from talk about how it needs to be divorced from things like gender, race and species. Really? Where's the charge in that? Perhaps there is one, and we simply can't imagine it, or perhaps the trick of it is comfort with discomfort -- a desirous equivalent to the Japanese mono no aware?

A remarkable number of people in my life have been fluent in languages they could neither read nor write. It's an odd thing.

[rm.livejournal.com]

It's like that presentation Alison did. Humor comes from pain. "Pointy shanks!"