one of the ways that race is percieved differently between USA/Europe and latin america is how whiteness is positioned in two completely different extremes, for example being mixed in Latin America was encouraged as a way of whitening "the race" by governments, plus previous colonizer worldviews of european superiority are deeply ingrained, thus a person being half white and half indigenous/black meant that you could sort of "quit" being indigenous/black especially if you were more white passing. This is very noticeable when you see that census' race cathegories in latin america are filled by self determination, and theres a huge amount of ppl who identify as white (european descendants would be a more exact cathegory than white tbh) but would never be seen as such in USA or Europe.

meanwhile in USA you have a whole line of thinking where "one drop of non white blood" turns you completely away from claiming whiteness, and just like with latam, a lot of POC people wouldnt be seen as such here either. Think zendaya for ex, i dont think anyone would have said shes a black woman in latam bc the parameters are very different bc whiteness is what is looked at first, how "much white you have in you" is the focus, its a completely inverted situation.

On literary standards, ‘good writing’ and fanfiction

(@zmediaoutlet​ I’m looking at you - I meant to message this to you but it’s WAY too long. But it’s in response to these two posts of yours: 1 / 2.)

This thing about good writing/bad writing and how you determine which is which is interesting to me because a lot of the academic work I've done - including my PhD - has looked at texts that others have considered 'bad writing'. (I was working on cheap fiction from the early c19, which is very melodramatic, founded in repetitive genre cliche, uses a sort of heightened self-consciously ~literary language, contains a lot of political polemic, and lots of other things that don't fit into the model of the Victorian realist novel.) Working on those kinds of texts the point of view that I've come to find most useful is less about 'goodness' (measured against standards of 'the literary') and more about 'success'. Does a piece manage to achieve what it wants to do, within the parameters of its form/intention?

Of course that relies on the reader having a sense of the genre/context which would give them an idea of what it is that the author is looking to achieve - of what are the success criteria for a work of this type - but a) that's useful in itself because it requires paying close attention to generic convention and b) I think I like it as a reading approach because it's more flexible and because it doesn't privilege a particular set of standards which are bound up, as you say, with an educational background that has historically been accessible only to certain privileged classes of society. If you're responding to the rules that the text is helping to make for itself then it means you're open to thinking about different ways that texts can work on their readers and I think that can be really rewarding. (The readers for the stuff I was doing in my PhD were mostly drawn from the working classes. They didn't have the same educational background as the wealthy people who had historically been the readership for printed fiction and as such it would be weird if the people writing for this audience produced works of the same type as were being sold to the rich. That doesn't mean, I think, that what was being done in that cheap fiction was less valuable or less interesting or less 'good'. It's just a different set of techniques with their own ends and investigating them offers a new perspective on some of the things that literature can do.)

Also - and I've been meaning to respond to this for ages but let's do it here - I was interested in how firmly you drew the dividing line in this response (which was fascinating so thank you) between emotive/catharsis fic vs 'literary' fic which you frame as more logical and argumentative (about exploring a point of view rather than working through an emotion). Surely the lines are a lot more blurred? When I read and enjoy a work of literature it's not primarily an analytical experience, most of the time; it's much more about the emotional response that the text evokes in me. That doesn't mean that I can't admire something that's deftly written or clever or thought-provoking, just that the emotional level is always present and often at the forefront. This isn’t necessarily different in fic. I think a lot of ‘literary’ fic is absolutely working with an emotional goal in mind.

I was thinking about this because in general the role of emotion in literature is another thing that really interests me, particularly in the context I guess of an academic response - why it's more sort of academically respectable to talk about literature in a dispassionate way than it is to discuss its affective impact on us. Literature - it seems to me - is so much about emotion, and exploring emotion, and getting an empathetic sense of other people's experiences which is inevitably largely emotional in nature just because that's how we interact with the world, that the idea of having to neatly separate off our emotional responses to it in order to provide a 'serious' reading is... well, I think it's another reflection of the idea that there's a proper audience for literature and a proper way to read it and anything outside that is less or wrong. That's not me personally getting at you, btw, no way, I'm just... thinking about it.

To clarify that last point; what you see a lot of in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century is educated male elites getting twitchy about the new audiences coming to printed texts (specifically women and the working class), and the way they sort of tried to exclude these audiences from the debate was to characterise them as very emotional readers who couldn't control their responses to literature. This made them vulnerable to bad influences and demanded that the existing elites take a sort of supervisory role, choosing which texts were suitable for these audiences to consume in order to ensure that they didn't come to harm from reading texts that were too ~exciting (politically, sexually). So of course one response to that is for these audiences to sort of haul themselves up and demonstrate that they can participate in cultural debate in the same detached dispassionate way as the male elite supposedly does already. But the other way is to query that whole premise by pointing out that actually, that's nonsense. Nobody's response to literature or art is devoid of emotion and if it IS devoid of emotion then it's a very narrow, limited kind of response to have. In the C19 a lot of these debates are framed around pornography and people's access to it - it's okay for rich men to look at things which wouldn't be suitable for women or the working class. (Think about the Lady Chatterley's Lover trial - this was a book that got banned in the UK in the 1920s - famously the barrister for the prosecution asked the jury if this was a novel they would be happy for their 'wives or servants' to read.) The justification for that is that these men can be detached, scientific, whatever in their responses. But that's obviously disingenuous when the whole point of porn is the emotional/physical response it provokes.

So I suppose from the course of doing the PhD, what I’ve come to is sort of... a skepticism about the way that an education in literary criticism can often encourage us to respond to what we read. I think it misses out some key elements of what literature does and I think there are sort of palpable reasons for the approach it takes which are founded in outdated models of literary interaction that try and dictate who readers ought to be and how texts ought to go about their business. And I find it more fun, if sometimes more work, to try and do something closer to what I’ve seen called ‘reparative reading’, where you try and build a set of standards that are particular to a certain type or genre of text. And in the context of fanfiction in particular, I think this is relevant because this is a genre written largely by and for a marginalised audience and so there’s an absolutely direct comparison to the kinds of material I was looking at from the nineteenth century.

I know that what you’ve been saying doesn’t sit in direct contradiction to this. It seems more like, you know what kinds of texts you most enjoy and the criteria for those align quite closely with established academic standards about ‘the literary’, which doesn’t of course mean that you wouldn’t leave room for the kind of approach I’m describing. But I wanted to write a fuller response to the ideas you’ve been throwing around, and so, here it is!