I'm a little confused. The author says she had never been to a creative writing workshop before, and implies this is the reason she starts believing "this analysis of work was the standard". I'm guessing there's other sources she absorbed this belief from, but without context I can only assume that she had a bad experience with one creative writing workshop. This absolutely might color one's perception of such workshops, but I find it a little unfair to come to the conclusion that all analysis will be the same at *every* workshop after only having gone to one of them.
I think that including context does a great service for writing, especially when we think about who might be reading it. Art is profoundly shaped and informed by the beliefs and perspective of the artist, no matter the topic at hand; this is something I learned as early as high school AP Literature, so I will never agree with the concept of a clean separation of art from artist - it just can't be done without harming the art itself.
When I'm writing something, I often like to think about who it's for, not on a commodification level, but on the level of a dialogue between a creator and their audience. Art carries an implicit message, an implicit belief, a feeling that was had when it was made, because it's a form of communication as well as entertainment. Writing an autobiographical piece, you are sharing a slice of life, like a story or a narrative from your own life experience. Is it that weird to expect that readers will want to know more about your background and where you come from, in order to more concretely place themselves in your shoes and see the ways in which they relate to you, and the ways in which they don't? In my opinion, empathy comes more readily when you can get a fuller picture of someone's life, including the ways in which they deal with socioeconomic & material constraints such as class status, employment, cultural background, because these are important factors in a person's life experience.
The people giving critique might have not used the best language for it, or might have come off too strongly, but I do think it's valuable advice to think about how you're communicating your ideas or your experience to other people while you're writing about it. Like everything else in writing, it's an incredibly difficult balance and you risk ruining the flow of the story, but the same things can happen with exposition, dialogue, etc.
The part of cancel culture that I do think is truly harmful and even scary, and that I have seen time and time again in creative spaces, is the aversion to even writing about negative or taboo topics such as sexual assault, paraphilias, stigmatized mental illnesses like bpd or aspd, racism/xenophobia, and other such topics, just because 'people don't want to read/watch something about that', or fear of grossing people out or offending them. The aversion to feeling negative emotion of any kind is one that I think needs to be talked about more in writing spaces, and I was hoping this critique might go into that a little bit more, because I have been met with backlash from even *within* alternative spaces like LGBT and furry communities for making and supporting art that is just a little bit too "out there" and might risk offending some pearl-clutchers who oppose the idea that I should have human rights as a transgender person.
Excellent piece - the author's experience writing about her chronic illness only to be scolded for not being an example of an intersection of hardship really rings true to me. It shouldn't be about 'who wrote this' only it should be about 'what are they saying and why?" Too. But all to often now it's about communicating self only, and only the parts of self that are acceptable to the zeitgeist. Excellent piece.
Thank you. I am pleased to see an essay like this come out. Your examples are clear and real-world. As a fairly new writer myself, writing about topics which do not always fit into the current mainstream literary narrative, I think about this subject all the time.
And my advice to all new moms! Sleep whenever you can. And enjoy it.
"It's not the end of the world," is one of the most helpful things we can include in our self-talk. I used to think politics was a matter of life and death, but I don't think that way anymore. How can it possibly hurt me to listen to someone else? Or simply to allow them to speak? A wonderful piece, and the best part about it, in my humble opinion, is your aspirational statement, "I hope to be engaged in the literary world for my whole life." You could have said, "I'm here ... and I'm in your face!" or you might have said, "Go ahead, cancel me," but you simply and confidently invited everyone, whether they agree or disagree with you, to engage with you, and convincingly explained why doing so will benefit anyone who does. Thank you for this. Good luck with your book.
I think this essay glosses over a lot of context with regard to cancel culture and book banning and bigotry. It leads to the question of how much of a conversation we can have in art, if some members of the conversation are (sometimes openly) bigots? Should we listen to artists who don’t view certain people as fully human or deserving of the rights of human beings? E.g. Zionists and people like J.K. Rowling…
This also relates to tolerance—if art is a conversation, to what extent can we tolerate those artists who can’t tolerate certain people? Also speaks to how tolerance is viewed as either standard or contract. If tolerance is a standard then we must tolerate bigots, who do hate certain people for who they are. If tolerance in the conversation of art is a contract then we shouldn’t tolerate people/artists who break this contract.
I also subscribe to the view that art can never be untangled from the artist, and that bigoted artists will most of the time produce art that is tinged with bigotry. Even the non-bigoted among us can be produce works with traces of bigotry.
I wish the essay delved further into these questions and provided more context around this debate. Otherwise there were some interesting points raised.
"Should we listen to artists who don’t view certain people as fully human or deserving of the rights of human beings? E.g. Zionists and people like J.K. Rowling…"
No Zionist would describe their beliefs that way and JK Rowling certainly would not. A klansman, however, would and could be safely dismissed. But a Zionist would argue for Jewish self-determination and statehood without compromising anybody else's humanity and Rowling doesn't argue that anybody is less than human but rather that the spaces, needs and interests of people born women should be respected without regard to the choices that others make with their bodies. You can disagree with both, and I often do, but you can't just dismiss it all as bigotry.
I can, because it is bigotry. It is bigoted to assert the "viewpoint" that "people born women" need their own spaces separate from those who aren't "born women", because the "needs and interests" of women are the same, regardless of how or where they are born - trans women and cis womens' needs are both directly opposed to misogyny. Do you really think that people can only hold a certain opinion if they spell it out for you in plain language? When JK Rowling talks about excluding certain women from women's spaces, she is saying that those women are undeserving of the right to access their own spaces, which is a denial of a basic human right. People with bigoted views will often couch their language in "sensibility" and "concern" for society, this has been a proven pattern throughout history. This has been happening since before the Civil War, let alone pre civil rights, all over the world. At this point Zionists are not holding their tongue, either - it is incredibly easy to find political cartoons depicting Palestinians as cockroaches, and the Israeli state as the boot.
Yes, this is why I find it troubling when the essay seems to implicitly defend Zionist poets and JK Rowling, and framing this defense as a neutral position, when in fact the essay’s position is quite a political position (i.e. anti-trans and Zionist) and one that stands on the side of bigotry.
hell, I would even say MOST people, bigoted or not, hold the opinion that some target group of people aren't human - murderers, rapists, bigots, etc. The world we live in teaches us from a young age that people who 'deserve' to go to prison are no longer deserving of human rights, more through example than anything else, since prisoners are treated in incredibly inhumane and humiliating ways by COs, and in many places this behavior goes unpunished. On every single level, America fails to treat its citizens as human beings, to the point where we self-flagellate for not being good enough workhorses.
Zionism is an ethnocultural nationalist movement contingent on an ethnonationalist/neocolonialist project on the lands of Palestine. It’s fundamentally bigoted. I would argue that the essay seems to ignore the context of Zionism and JK Rowling’s transphobia when using both as examples, which stood out to me. I’m not going to argue any further. Thanks 🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸✨
And Zionism is all about the establishment of an ethnostate on land which was already occupied by other people, that is the Palestinians… it’s an ideology which has led to the current Palestinian genocide. There are plenty of Jews who are anti-Zionists as evidenced by the protests against Israel worldwide. But that’s not the point of the essay and my response. The point here was to what extent can we tolerate bigotry in the conversation of art—is it possible to tolerate people who dehumanize certain “other” groups of people? I think the essay above doesn’t address that question. 🇵🇸🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️✨
Hi, this piece makes no sense. The fact that you quote something called "The Witch Trials of JK Rowling" and its first question asks us to "entertain real doubts" about our beliefs that trans people deserve basic human rights is certainly a take.
Stop whining about "cancel culture" when people don't agree with your shitty ideas.
Our community is deeply fractured and it is not healthy.
People in The Arts need to feel like they do not have to self-censor beyond (what should be obvious) extremes. The extremes (hate speech, racism, misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, and so forth) you will see stated in many lit mag submission guidelines are if you needed the reminder, then you already need to do a bit of soul-searching.
Because frequently, what we believe is who we are and what we do. If someone hangs a confederate flag on their door, they will very likely also vote red to be anti-migrants and call the cops on their neighbors. Beliefs, fequently but not always, result in real world consequences that bode terribly for some, and somehow becomes a reward or reinforcement of other's normativity in white supremacy.
I think I know what the writer is responding to (also in her own fear based approach that seems non-compassionate) - the kind of identity politics driven white liberalism that lacks all nuance and at the end of the day is unprocessed hurt feelings hurled at other people in the form of policing everything (evident in the first MFA example of being critisized for writing about her lived experience re: illness). That's very fair, and can we have less of that, please? But the rest of the examples she gave are...all politics coded.
In arguing with those examples, everything else feels not nuanced too. Uplifting a Zionist poet to write about, maybe cooking or whatever, is not an issue in and of itself. Implying that someone who believes in annihlating people to continue 21st century colonialism, deserves to be uplifted, and when people are dying, is. And it also marks that literary space very unsafe for anyone who believes the opposite, who's very existence requires believing the opposite. It's like promoting Israeli condos for a diversity of opinions in real estate but not giving a shit about where and how those condos are built. I just don't think learning to extend olive branches and figuring out discourse and decreasing polarization will be resolved this way either.
Also, its been so many thousands of years of uplifting and rewarding writing by people who don't believe that non (white) men should be human. For the next few hundred years even if white liberal identity politics lead all curation of writing - im not so mad about it. Though it would be very boring 😴
Bringing up Zionist poets and JK Rowling while ignoring the nuances and context behind their Zionism and transphobia is certainly something. I would say the question is whether we artists, including trans artists and Palestinian artists, can have a conversation (art as conversation) with other artists who think certain artists/people aren’t deserving of human rights or aren’t fully human.
I think that would require a lot of third party guardrails and good faith and willingness to soften/see each other. The mechanics/processes of which weren't discussed in this article but would be a very good topic to delve into.
First and most importantly, congratulations on your new child! Hooray!
For this essay in particular, while I appreciate you had a shitty experience, I would like to invite you to read into the topic of "bothsideism," or if you want the philosophical term for this logical fallacy: false equivalency.
This essay is a classic piece of bothesideism, and although I am genuinely sorry you felt personally attacked by the response to an essay you wrote in a college course, I would like to gently point out that your reaction to that is not remotely in line with the five questions you reference towards the end of this essay.
Did you, yourself, ask these questions about your reaction to that situation? Have you examined why you feel attacked by people who oppose the uncritical promotion of right-wing American Christian worldviews? (Because to be clear, the problem is almost never "this promote Christianity" but "the way this promotes Christianity is actively harmful to some people.")
Here are a few articles you could read about bothesideism when you are ready and willing to learn more about that and more closely examine your own blind spots—which is super hard and uncomfortable to do (I know this as someone who spent much of my childhood in the south!) but is an important part of being human, and of growing as a writer and a person.
I think the issue they are trying to put their finger on is that if you cannot engage in argument or even conversation you are creating a silos when it comes to certain topics and then the rumblings and ruminations of that thing just grow and grow in a vacuum of ignorance. We are seeing the very real repercussions of this now played out around the world. If a topic is not discussed with anyone other than the people who all agree it's never interrogated properly. It's also important to acknowledge that the personal is personal. You can't read a person's essay on an illness that has profoundly changed their life and give the feedback that 'oh you forgot to talk about how privileged you are' without insulting them. I think that we like to think in academia that we are above this and we are being reflexive and helpful when we do this but really we need to think on what it means to critically interrogate a person's ability to communicate on something by saying 'oh you can't talk about that," or "you can't talk about that without xyz because you are abc' - that can silence the person and take away their power to communicate instead of getting them to broaden their thinking. I don't want to go into details as it's probably triggering for others but hopefully this example demonstrates why I think this: my mum is now dead and before she died I posted on Instagram that she was heartbroken to realise that her first name 'Karen' means 'racist complaining woman' among young people and on the internet (This was about 7 years ago the name is now ubiquitous with just meaning complaining). Because of this I got a lecture from an acquaintance calling me racist and telling me to read a book on white fragility with a link to it. My mum was dying and sad. And that was this person's response. I didn't 'feel personally attacked.' I was. That person achieved nothing. I was interested in reading that book before they mentioned it but now I never will. Maybe this example will get the point across to you a bit better than the author of this essay has. If you alienate people and make it feel that they can't talk about something they will still talk about it, but never with you or with anyone who could gently and appropriately question them on their ideas.
I would add onto Stewart’s point further. The essay is also troubling when it provides implicit credence to Zionist poets and JK Rowling. The essay assumes a “neutral” position when in fact its arguments are actually quite political, and clumsily aligns itself with the anti-trans movement and Zionism which are both explicitly political movements and cannot be neutral as such.
Very well written, but why put the onus on readers to be more "open" to opposing viewpoints?
A reader's response will always be out of your control. So why try to control it or worry about it?
I write on Substack and Medium (for the pub Counter Arts) -- I get to write what I care most about -- but I don't care whether readers agree or even if they bother to read any of it. Some will and many will not. All that matters to me is the writing and the crafting, not the response.
Yes, but the question at least from many of these comments, is whether or not you should be deplatformed for reasons that have nothing to do with the writing itself. And I don't buy the po-mo view that all writing is political, non-objective, etc.
Deplatformed? But putting it that way, aren't you just politicizing the issue yourself? You're using the word not in its legal sense -- being removed because of behavior or content that violates the website's guidelines or terms of service -- but because other readers have decided to turn their backs on them.
What does it matter what the "reasons" are? Are you writing for some imaginary "them"? To get their attention. Or because you have something you NEED to say? If you don't, then why bother? And if you do, then why be bothered *after* you've finished if only a few (or none) bother to listen. Just be here now.
You seem to have missed my point completely. There are several examples of what I was describing in this thread visa-vis deplatforming Zionists regardless of what they're writing about. But I'll stop here.
Another Zionist playing the anti-Semite card? -- but if I said anything like that, you might think I was just another one of those "self-hating" Jews. But I'm not. So I'm not going to say anything like that. 🙂
Thank you for your clear and compelling article. You have shone light on a very serious threat to free speech, a personal freedom long fought for and still not available to many. I was shocked to hear of your experience in university. A painter I know presented her MA thesis project in a Canadian University (landscape paintings), to her peers and they turned their chairs around so she was forced to talk to their backs.
Reminds me of the puritanism of the seventeenth century.
We need more of this. The politicization of the arts makes things toxic, and it stifles innovation and growth. I don't give a damn about an author's identity, ethnicity, or voting record. It's the text that's important: Is this good writing? That counts for any artistic expression: writing, music, drawing, etc. This whole identity politics and cancel culture coming from the left has inspired the right to impose their own measures, like book bans, and bad laws, and everything escalates into an unhealthy mess.
I don't agree with everybody, I recognize that many may not share my opinions of numerous topics, and that's OK. I want to understand others' viewpoints and thoughts, NOT silence them. I might even learn something.
Great piece, but I'd go further. Society is full of racism, sexism, violence and far worse. We've just seen black masked far right guys setting fire to the houses of immigrants in Belfast. Writing needs to be able to look at that dark, awful side of humanity, because we're all capable of it, along with all being capable of real good. Writing and reading are the safe ways to explore that dark kind of psychology, not to condone people who act that way, but to understand what drives it in order to prevent it. Writing should be about delving into dark psychological recesses and creating characters that hold up a mirror to society and make people feel uncomfortable. But often now the "cancel culture" will conflate a character and what they say or think with what the author believes, which is just idiotic. Is every character supposed to be a bland, nice person?
There's a great short story, "My son the fanatic" by Hanif Kureishi that looks at a father and son relationship where the son has become radicalised. Both characters are flawed, as they should be. Both in conflict. That's what good writing should do - play out our own conflicts and inner battles, which will be similar to all living in our times.
Far too often cancel culture more effectively silences really strong voices, debate and attempts to challenge narratives than even authoritarian governments could do. And as writing becomes ever more bland, safe and "cosy", the real world goes ever further to hell.
Thank you for this thoughtful piece on cancel culture (also love the art pairing).
This is a topic I think of often (I've been writing/pitching a related piece for two years). Also as a vegan, I realize that I cannot cancel ~95% of the population who still eat animals, regardless of my belief in the inherent cruelty of the systems they are confined within and that most of us support. My cancellation would not help animals.
One of my favorite thought leaders on this topic is professor Loretta Ross, who has a book & talk-- "Calling In: How to Start Making Change with Those You'd Rather Cancel." https://lorettajross.com/callingin-online. Recommend.
I'm going to start with a favorite quote from Zadie Smith:Full disclosure: what insults my soul is the idea — popular in the culture just now, and presented in widely variant degrees of complexity — that we can and should write only about people who are fundamentally “like” us: racially, sexually, genetically, nationally, politically, personally. That only an intimate authorial autobiographical connection with a character can be the rightful basis of a fiction. I do not believe that. I could not have written a single one of my books if I did.
In 2020 I got Covid. 2 months later it was clear that I had a lingering disease, dubbed Long Covid a bit later. In 2026 I still have Long Covid. I have had some stories and poems published recently; I cannot get any piece that deals with covid or long covid published - so far. I've just finished fist draft of a novel - The Careless Plague - about the pandemic period, people who got covid of LC, people who died people who cared for them, nurses, doctors, people who experience the inequities of the world amplified during the pandemic. I'm a cisgender white guy. Because the pandemic struck everyone but had a far worse toll on BIPOC and LGBTQ people, because Asian hate crimes rose 2,000% in some areas, many of my characters are, yes, BIPOC and LGBTQ people. They have to be, or else these stories are sorrowfully incomplete.
We fought a war and hardly anyone is writing about it. I suspect, partly, because they are afraid of the backlash, afraid of putting in all that work and finding no one willing to publish. Much of the response during the pandemic (and now, and of course before the pandemic) in America was/is care-lessness. I felt I had no choice but to write this - I still experience gaslighting and even disdain for talking about Long Covid. As do millions of us.
Derrick Michael Kardos, the graphic designer whose work shaped the look of films from The Manchurian Candidate to Black Swan, died July 18 in Carteret, New Jersey, from complications of Long COVID, his family said. He was 53.
Derrick Michael Kardos, the designer whose work shaped the look of films from The Manchurian Candidate to Black Swan, died July 18 in Carteret, New Jersey, from complications of Long COVID, his family said. He was 53. “This is my experience. I do not speak for all gays. But I am 52 and I have experienced more discrimination and stigma for being openly disabled by #LongCovid than I ever did for being openly gay.”
Someone needs to talk about the pandemic and how it was a lens on our culture - for a moment it helped make inequities and marginalizations crystal clear, and it also awakened us to a different group of people who have experienced that for many decades - the chronically ill, tens of millions of us. (Megan O'Rourke wrote The Invisible Kingdom about such people, the title is apt.) We need publishers, literary mags, willing to to publish writers who take the risk of writing about this.
No writer of any color, religion, nationality, sexual orientation knows all people first hand. Yet I feel it is our job to use such empathy and research, reaching out - including talking to people different from us - to include all humans in our work. Or else how impoverished fiction (the job of which is to make the invisible visible, to get people to feel the people behind the dry stats they often get in the news) will become - another siloed I do not feel that I am appropriating anyone's culture with this book - rather, I am trying to get stories out that need to be told, lest they be forgotten - the pandemic and its effects, including ongoing effects of 20+ million with Long Covid, is another piece of history now being erased. Our current political shit show and many of our societal memes now embrace care-lessness; we need to become a caring society. Fiction and poetry can help.
I'll close with another Zadie Smith quote: What would our debates about fiction look like, I sometimes wonder, if our preferred verbal container for the phenomenon of writing about others was not “cultural appropriation” but rather “interpersonal voyeurism” or “profound other-fascination” or even “cross-epidermal reanimation”? Our discussions would still be vibrant, perhaps even still furious — but I’m certain they would not be the same.
I'm a little confused. The author says she had never been to a creative writing workshop before, and implies this is the reason she starts believing "this analysis of work was the standard". I'm guessing there's other sources she absorbed this belief from, but without context I can only assume that she had a bad experience with one creative writing workshop. This absolutely might color one's perception of such workshops, but I find it a little unfair to come to the conclusion that all analysis will be the same at *every* workshop after only having gone to one of them.
I think that including context does a great service for writing, especially when we think about who might be reading it. Art is profoundly shaped and informed by the beliefs and perspective of the artist, no matter the topic at hand; this is something I learned as early as high school AP Literature, so I will never agree with the concept of a clean separation of art from artist - it just can't be done without harming the art itself.
When I'm writing something, I often like to think about who it's for, not on a commodification level, but on the level of a dialogue between a creator and their audience. Art carries an implicit message, an implicit belief, a feeling that was had when it was made, because it's a form of communication as well as entertainment. Writing an autobiographical piece, you are sharing a slice of life, like a story or a narrative from your own life experience. Is it that weird to expect that readers will want to know more about your background and where you come from, in order to more concretely place themselves in your shoes and see the ways in which they relate to you, and the ways in which they don't? In my opinion, empathy comes more readily when you can get a fuller picture of someone's life, including the ways in which they deal with socioeconomic & material constraints such as class status, employment, cultural background, because these are important factors in a person's life experience.
The people giving critique might have not used the best language for it, or might have come off too strongly, but I do think it's valuable advice to think about how you're communicating your ideas or your experience to other people while you're writing about it. Like everything else in writing, it's an incredibly difficult balance and you risk ruining the flow of the story, but the same things can happen with exposition, dialogue, etc.
The part of cancel culture that I do think is truly harmful and even scary, and that I have seen time and time again in creative spaces, is the aversion to even writing about negative or taboo topics such as sexual assault, paraphilias, stigmatized mental illnesses like bpd or aspd, racism/xenophobia, and other such topics, just because 'people don't want to read/watch something about that', or fear of grossing people out or offending them. The aversion to feeling negative emotion of any kind is one that I think needs to be talked about more in writing spaces, and I was hoping this critique might go into that a little bit more, because I have been met with backlash from even *within* alternative spaces like LGBT and furry communities for making and supporting art that is just a little bit too "out there" and might risk offending some pearl-clutchers who oppose the idea that I should have human rights as a transgender person.
Thank you for this brilliant response to what is (in essence) a bland, tired, "both sides matter" argument.
This is a great perspective, and I love that last paragraph! We still have taboos and they are not often interrogated or explored.
Excellent piece - the author's experience writing about her chronic illness only to be scolded for not being an example of an intersection of hardship really rings true to me. It shouldn't be about 'who wrote this' only it should be about 'what are they saying and why?" Too. But all to often now it's about communicating self only, and only the parts of self that are acceptable to the zeitgeist. Excellent piece.
Thank you. I am pleased to see an essay like this come out. Your examples are clear and real-world. As a fairly new writer myself, writing about topics which do not always fit into the current mainstream literary narrative, I think about this subject all the time.
And my advice to all new moms! Sleep whenever you can. And enjoy it.
"It's not the end of the world," is one of the most helpful things we can include in our self-talk. I used to think politics was a matter of life and death, but I don't think that way anymore. How can it possibly hurt me to listen to someone else? Or simply to allow them to speak? A wonderful piece, and the best part about it, in my humble opinion, is your aspirational statement, "I hope to be engaged in the literary world for my whole life." You could have said, "I'm here ... and I'm in your face!" or you might have said, "Go ahead, cancel me," but you simply and confidently invited everyone, whether they agree or disagree with you, to engage with you, and convincingly explained why doing so will benefit anyone who does. Thank you for this. Good luck with your book.
I think this essay glosses over a lot of context with regard to cancel culture and book banning and bigotry. It leads to the question of how much of a conversation we can have in art, if some members of the conversation are (sometimes openly) bigots? Should we listen to artists who don’t view certain people as fully human or deserving of the rights of human beings? E.g. Zionists and people like J.K. Rowling…
This also relates to tolerance—if art is a conversation, to what extent can we tolerate those artists who can’t tolerate certain people? Also speaks to how tolerance is viewed as either standard or contract. If tolerance is a standard then we must tolerate bigots, who do hate certain people for who they are. If tolerance in the conversation of art is a contract then we shouldn’t tolerate people/artists who break this contract.
I also subscribe to the view that art can never be untangled from the artist, and that bigoted artists will most of the time produce art that is tinged with bigotry. Even the non-bigoted among us can be produce works with traces of bigotry.
I wish the essay delved further into these questions and provided more context around this debate. Otherwise there were some interesting points raised.
"Should we listen to artists who don’t view certain people as fully human or deserving of the rights of human beings? E.g. Zionists and people like J.K. Rowling…"
No Zionist would describe their beliefs that way and JK Rowling certainly would not. A klansman, however, would and could be safely dismissed. But a Zionist would argue for Jewish self-determination and statehood without compromising anybody else's humanity and Rowling doesn't argue that anybody is less than human but rather that the spaces, needs and interests of people born women should be respected without regard to the choices that others make with their bodies. You can disagree with both, and I often do, but you can't just dismiss it all as bigotry.
I can, because it is bigotry. It is bigoted to assert the "viewpoint" that "people born women" need their own spaces separate from those who aren't "born women", because the "needs and interests" of women are the same, regardless of how or where they are born - trans women and cis womens' needs are both directly opposed to misogyny. Do you really think that people can only hold a certain opinion if they spell it out for you in plain language? When JK Rowling talks about excluding certain women from women's spaces, she is saying that those women are undeserving of the right to access their own spaces, which is a denial of a basic human right. People with bigoted views will often couch their language in "sensibility" and "concern" for society, this has been a proven pattern throughout history. This has been happening since before the Civil War, let alone pre civil rights, all over the world. At this point Zionists are not holding their tongue, either - it is incredibly easy to find political cartoons depicting Palestinians as cockroaches, and the Israeli state as the boot.
Yes, this is why I find it troubling when the essay seems to implicitly defend Zionist poets and JK Rowling, and framing this defense as a neutral position, when in fact the essay’s position is quite a political position (i.e. anti-trans and Zionist) and one that stands on the side of bigotry.
hell, I would even say MOST people, bigoted or not, hold the opinion that some target group of people aren't human - murderers, rapists, bigots, etc. The world we live in teaches us from a young age that people who 'deserve' to go to prison are no longer deserving of human rights, more through example than anything else, since prisoners are treated in incredibly inhumane and humiliating ways by COs, and in many places this behavior goes unpunished. On every single level, America fails to treat its citizens as human beings, to the point where we self-flagellate for not being good enough workhorses.
Zionism is an ethnocultural nationalist movement contingent on an ethnonationalist/neocolonialist project on the lands of Palestine. It’s fundamentally bigoted. I would argue that the essay seems to ignore the context of Zionism and JK Rowling’s transphobia when using both as examples, which stood out to me. I’m not going to argue any further. Thanks 🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸✨
Surely no need for us to argue, but if you're going to present your opinions as facts, I am going to have to point out what you're up to.
Just stating the reality that Rowling has been quite open about being anti-trans https://overland.org.au/2020/06/being-a-caretaker-a-response-to-jk-rowling/
And Zionism is all about the establishment of an ethnostate on land which was already occupied by other people, that is the Palestinians… it’s an ideology which has led to the current Palestinian genocide. There are plenty of Jews who are anti-Zionists as evidenced by the protests against Israel worldwide. But that’s not the point of the essay and my response. The point here was to what extent can we tolerate bigotry in the conversation of art—is it possible to tolerate people who dehumanize certain “other” groups of people? I think the essay above doesn’t address that question. 🇵🇸🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️✨
Hi, this piece makes no sense. The fact that you quote something called "The Witch Trials of JK Rowling" and its first question asks us to "entertain real doubts" about our beliefs that trans people deserve basic human rights is certainly a take.
Stop whining about "cancel culture" when people don't agree with your shitty ideas.
It's not cancel culture, it's critical thinking.
laugh emoji
I thought the mention of Zionist poets was also pretty out of left field, especially in the context of the genocide in Palestine.
Good piece.
The 5 questions are good ones.
Our community is deeply fractured and it is not healthy.
People in The Arts need to feel like they do not have to self-censor beyond (what should be obvious) extremes. The extremes (hate speech, racism, misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, and so forth) you will see stated in many lit mag submission guidelines are if you needed the reminder, then you already need to do a bit of soul-searching.
Because frequently, what we believe is who we are and what we do. If someone hangs a confederate flag on their door, they will very likely also vote red to be anti-migrants and call the cops on their neighbors. Beliefs, fequently but not always, result in real world consequences that bode terribly for some, and somehow becomes a reward or reinforcement of other's normativity in white supremacy.
I think I know what the writer is responding to (also in her own fear based approach that seems non-compassionate) - the kind of identity politics driven white liberalism that lacks all nuance and at the end of the day is unprocessed hurt feelings hurled at other people in the form of policing everything (evident in the first MFA example of being critisized for writing about her lived experience re: illness). That's very fair, and can we have less of that, please? But the rest of the examples she gave are...all politics coded.
In arguing with those examples, everything else feels not nuanced too. Uplifting a Zionist poet to write about, maybe cooking or whatever, is not an issue in and of itself. Implying that someone who believes in annihlating people to continue 21st century colonialism, deserves to be uplifted, and when people are dying, is. And it also marks that literary space very unsafe for anyone who believes the opposite, who's very existence requires believing the opposite. It's like promoting Israeli condos for a diversity of opinions in real estate but not giving a shit about where and how those condos are built. I just don't think learning to extend olive branches and figuring out discourse and decreasing polarization will be resolved this way either.
Also, its been so many thousands of years of uplifting and rewarding writing by people who don't believe that non (white) men should be human. For the next few hundred years even if white liberal identity politics lead all curation of writing - im not so mad about it. Though it would be very boring 😴
Bringing up Zionist poets and JK Rowling while ignoring the nuances and context behind their Zionism and transphobia is certainly something. I would say the question is whether we artists, including trans artists and Palestinian artists, can have a conversation (art as conversation) with other artists who think certain artists/people aren’t deserving of human rights or aren’t fully human.
I think that would require a lot of third party guardrails and good faith and willingness to soften/see each other. The mechanics/processes of which weren't discussed in this article but would be a very good topic to delve into.
First and most importantly, congratulations on your new child! Hooray!
For this essay in particular, while I appreciate you had a shitty experience, I would like to invite you to read into the topic of "bothsideism," or if you want the philosophical term for this logical fallacy: false equivalency.
This essay is a classic piece of bothesideism, and although I am genuinely sorry you felt personally attacked by the response to an essay you wrote in a college course, I would like to gently point out that your reaction to that is not remotely in line with the five questions you reference towards the end of this essay.
Did you, yourself, ask these questions about your reaction to that situation? Have you examined why you feel attacked by people who oppose the uncritical promotion of right-wing American Christian worldviews? (Because to be clear, the problem is almost never "this promote Christianity" but "the way this promotes Christianity is actively harmful to some people.")
Here are a few articles you could read about bothesideism when you are ready and willing to learn more about that and more closely examine your own blind spots—which is super hard and uncomfortable to do (I know this as someone who spent much of my childhood in the south!) but is an important part of being human, and of growing as a writer and a person.
https://democracytoolkit.press/resources/avoid-both-sidesism-journalism-tips/
https://theconversation.com/suicide-for-democracy-what-is-bothsidesism-and-how-is-it-different-from-journalistic-objectivity-230894
I think the issue they are trying to put their finger on is that if you cannot engage in argument or even conversation you are creating a silos when it comes to certain topics and then the rumblings and ruminations of that thing just grow and grow in a vacuum of ignorance. We are seeing the very real repercussions of this now played out around the world. If a topic is not discussed with anyone other than the people who all agree it's never interrogated properly. It's also important to acknowledge that the personal is personal. You can't read a person's essay on an illness that has profoundly changed their life and give the feedback that 'oh you forgot to talk about how privileged you are' without insulting them. I think that we like to think in academia that we are above this and we are being reflexive and helpful when we do this but really we need to think on what it means to critically interrogate a person's ability to communicate on something by saying 'oh you can't talk about that," or "you can't talk about that without xyz because you are abc' - that can silence the person and take away their power to communicate instead of getting them to broaden their thinking. I don't want to go into details as it's probably triggering for others but hopefully this example demonstrates why I think this: my mum is now dead and before she died I posted on Instagram that she was heartbroken to realise that her first name 'Karen' means 'racist complaining woman' among young people and on the internet (This was about 7 years ago the name is now ubiquitous with just meaning complaining). Because of this I got a lecture from an acquaintance calling me racist and telling me to read a book on white fragility with a link to it. My mum was dying and sad. And that was this person's response. I didn't 'feel personally attacked.' I was. That person achieved nothing. I was interested in reading that book before they mentioned it but now I never will. Maybe this example will get the point across to you a bit better than the author of this essay has. If you alienate people and make it feel that they can't talk about something they will still talk about it, but never with you or with anyone who could gently and appropriately question them on their ideas.
straw man...
I would add onto Stewart’s point further. The essay is also troubling when it provides implicit credence to Zionist poets and JK Rowling. The essay assumes a “neutral” position when in fact its arguments are actually quite political, and clumsily aligns itself with the anti-trans movement and Zionism which are both explicitly political movements and cannot be neutral as such.
Very well written, but why put the onus on readers to be more "open" to opposing viewpoints?
A reader's response will always be out of your control. So why try to control it or worry about it?
I write on Substack and Medium (for the pub Counter Arts) -- I get to write what I care most about -- but I don't care whether readers agree or even if they bother to read any of it. Some will and many will not. All that matters to me is the writing and the crafting, not the response.
Yes, but the question at least from many of these comments, is whether or not you should be deplatformed for reasons that have nothing to do with the writing itself. And I don't buy the po-mo view that all writing is political, non-objective, etc.
Deplatformed? But putting it that way, aren't you just politicizing the issue yourself? You're using the word not in its legal sense -- being removed because of behavior or content that violates the website's guidelines or terms of service -- but because other readers have decided to turn their backs on them.
What does it matter what the "reasons" are? Are you writing for some imaginary "them"? To get their attention. Or because you have something you NEED to say? If you don't, then why bother? And if you do, then why be bothered *after* you've finished if only a few (or none) bother to listen. Just be here now.
You seem to have missed my point completely. There are several examples of what I was describing in this thread visa-vis deplatforming Zionists regardless of what they're writing about. But I'll stop here.
Another Zionist playing the anti-Semite card? -- but if I said anything like that, you might think I was just another one of those "self-hating" Jews. But I'm not. So I'm not going to say anything like that. 🙂
Thank you for your clear and compelling article. You have shone light on a very serious threat to free speech, a personal freedom long fought for and still not available to many. I was shocked to hear of your experience in university. A painter I know presented her MA thesis project in a Canadian University (landscape paintings), to her peers and they turned their chairs around so she was forced to talk to their backs.
Reminds me of the puritanism of the seventeenth century.
I’ve always believed in separating the art from the artist.
We need more of this. The politicization of the arts makes things toxic, and it stifles innovation and growth. I don't give a damn about an author's identity, ethnicity, or voting record. It's the text that's important: Is this good writing? That counts for any artistic expression: writing, music, drawing, etc. This whole identity politics and cancel culture coming from the left has inspired the right to impose their own measures, like book bans, and bad laws, and everything escalates into an unhealthy mess.
I don't agree with everybody, I recognize that many may not share my opinions of numerous topics, and that's OK. I want to understand others' viewpoints and thoughts, NOT silence them. I might even learn something.
Great piece, but I'd go further. Society is full of racism, sexism, violence and far worse. We've just seen black masked far right guys setting fire to the houses of immigrants in Belfast. Writing needs to be able to look at that dark, awful side of humanity, because we're all capable of it, along with all being capable of real good. Writing and reading are the safe ways to explore that dark kind of psychology, not to condone people who act that way, but to understand what drives it in order to prevent it. Writing should be about delving into dark psychological recesses and creating characters that hold up a mirror to society and make people feel uncomfortable. But often now the "cancel culture" will conflate a character and what they say or think with what the author believes, which is just idiotic. Is every character supposed to be a bland, nice person?
There's a great short story, "My son the fanatic" by Hanif Kureishi that looks at a father and son relationship where the son has become radicalised. Both characters are flawed, as they should be. Both in conflict. That's what good writing should do - play out our own conflicts and inner battles, which will be similar to all living in our times.
Far too often cancel culture more effectively silences really strong voices, debate and attempts to challenge narratives than even authoritarian governments could do. And as writing becomes ever more bland, safe and "cosy", the real world goes ever further to hell.
Thank you for this thoughtful piece on cancel culture (also love the art pairing).
This is a topic I think of often (I've been writing/pitching a related piece for two years). Also as a vegan, I realize that I cannot cancel ~95% of the population who still eat animals, regardless of my belief in the inherent cruelty of the systems they are confined within and that most of us support. My cancellation would not help animals.
One of my favorite thought leaders on this topic is professor Loretta Ross, who has a book & talk-- "Calling In: How to Start Making Change with Those You'd Rather Cancel." https://lorettajross.com/callingin-online. Recommend.
This is a great and very needed essay!
I'm going to start with a favorite quote from Zadie Smith:Full disclosure: what insults my soul is the idea — popular in the culture just now, and presented in widely variant degrees of complexity — that we can and should write only about people who are fundamentally “like” us: racially, sexually, genetically, nationally, politically, personally. That only an intimate authorial autobiographical connection with a character can be the rightful basis of a fiction. I do not believe that. I could not have written a single one of my books if I did.
In 2020 I got Covid. 2 months later it was clear that I had a lingering disease, dubbed Long Covid a bit later. In 2026 I still have Long Covid. I have had some stories and poems published recently; I cannot get any piece that deals with covid or long covid published - so far. I've just finished fist draft of a novel - The Careless Plague - about the pandemic period, people who got covid of LC, people who died people who cared for them, nurses, doctors, people who experience the inequities of the world amplified during the pandemic. I'm a cisgender white guy. Because the pandemic struck everyone but had a far worse toll on BIPOC and LGBTQ people, because Asian hate crimes rose 2,000% in some areas, many of my characters are, yes, BIPOC and LGBTQ people. They have to be, or else these stories are sorrowfully incomplete.
We fought a war and hardly anyone is writing about it. I suspect, partly, because they are afraid of the backlash, afraid of putting in all that work and finding no one willing to publish. Much of the response during the pandemic (and now, and of course before the pandemic) in America was/is care-lessness. I felt I had no choice but to write this - I still experience gaslighting and even disdain for talking about Long Covid. As do millions of us.
Derrick Michael Kardos, the graphic designer whose work shaped the look of films from The Manchurian Candidate to Black Swan, died July 18 in Carteret, New Jersey, from complications of Long COVID, his family said. He was 53.
Derrick Michael Kardos, the designer whose work shaped the look of films from The Manchurian Candidate to Black Swan, died July 18 in Carteret, New Jersey, from complications of Long COVID, his family said. He was 53. “This is my experience. I do not speak for all gays. But I am 52 and I have experienced more discrimination and stigma for being openly disabled by #LongCovid than I ever did for being openly gay.”
Someone needs to talk about the pandemic and how it was a lens on our culture - for a moment it helped make inequities and marginalizations crystal clear, and it also awakened us to a different group of people who have experienced that for many decades - the chronically ill, tens of millions of us. (Megan O'Rourke wrote The Invisible Kingdom about such people, the title is apt.) We need publishers, literary mags, willing to to publish writers who take the risk of writing about this.
No writer of any color, religion, nationality, sexual orientation knows all people first hand. Yet I feel it is our job to use such empathy and research, reaching out - including talking to people different from us - to include all humans in our work. Or else how impoverished fiction (the job of which is to make the invisible visible, to get people to feel the people behind the dry stats they often get in the news) will become - another siloed I do not feel that I am appropriating anyone's culture with this book - rather, I am trying to get stories out that need to be told, lest they be forgotten - the pandemic and its effects, including ongoing effects of 20+ million with Long Covid, is another piece of history now being erased. Our current political shit show and many of our societal memes now embrace care-lessness; we need to become a caring society. Fiction and poetry can help.
I'll close with another Zadie Smith quote: What would our debates about fiction look like, I sometimes wonder, if our preferred verbal container for the phenomenon of writing about others was not “cultural appropriation” but rather “interpersonal voyeurism” or “profound other-fascination” or even “cross-epidermal reanimation”? Our discussions would still be vibrant, perhaps even still furious — but I’m certain they would not be the same.