On Writing What You Don't Know

I was first introduced to Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward's concept of Writing the Other -- creating characters whose race, sexual orientation, or cultural background differs from one's own, and doing so without further marginalizing already marginalized groups -- via the sadly defunct Feminist With Disabilities site. It's something I think about often, and has caused me to reevaluate my writing from time to time.

Full disclosure: I've written very little fiction in the past few years, and some of that has to do with my fear of effectively "writing the other." I wish I could say with age and wisdom comes better understand of one's own privilege, but there are a lot of critically acclaimed books that managed to fail. Julie Serano, author of Whipping Girl, points to Jeffery Eugenides's Middlsex as an example of a book, though highly praised, that further erases trans voices by playing into some old tropes. She says:

When academics appropriate transsexual and intersex experiences for their essays and theories, and when they clip out specific aspects of our lives and paste them together out of context to make their own creatives, they are simply contributing to our erasure.

I'm cis myself, so I say this with some trepidation, but I think an example of a cis person successfully creating a trans character -- a good example "writing the other" -- is Felicia Luna Lemus's Like Son. The central character is a trans man, but the conflict doesn't revolve around his sexuality. It's almost irrelevant.

Too few writing instructors talk about "writing the other." I've taken a few workshops, and the only advice I've been given is "you're only limited by your imagination." If that imagination springs from a place of privilege, coupled with living in a society that's inherently racist, sexist, classist and homophobic and transphobic, where do we go from there?