by Jaym Gates
So where do clichés fit into this?
Clichés are a kind of shorthand for an un-valued story element. Clichés are a shortcut for the lazy writer, and are a stand-in for actual creativity and reflection. All of this assumes that the use of clichés is not intended as some kind of ironic or meta-turn within the frame of the story itself, an increasingly favorite trick for some writers, so much so that it has become something of a meta-cliché itself.
There are a number of problems with uncritically accepting clichés: the first, and most obvious, is that it’s lazy not just for the writer, but also for the reader. Further, it limits the range of possibilities in character viewpoint as well as audience identification with the characters and their story. The use of clichés is a set of clues towards who and what the author assumes is familiar to the reader, and the background of the reader in culture, language, class — everything. It presumes that a specific subset of the overall audience somehow has a greater claim of ownership to the viewpoints and perspectives of the main characters than anyone else [3]. The biggest assumption underlying all of this is one about the associations between the characters in the story, as well as the writers and readers — a set of assumptions about “us” and “them” and who belongs where and who is related to whom.
For science fiction and fantasy, drawing upon imagined contexts and created cultures, this set of associative assumptions is an extension of Benedict Anderson’s argument in his book, Imagined Communities, that national identity is limited, sovereign, and constitutes a community — there is an “us” living within a set of boundaries “we” have defined and where people like “us” live. This is simultaneously in real and imaginary contexts. The real world context of writing provides one substrate of understanding which maps onto contemporary and historically-understood boundaries, while at the same moment, the imaginary context of the story provides a parallel substrate layered on top of the first, with connections between the imaginary and real world contexts as a set of guideposts for the reader; e.g. the Stewards of Gondor reign until a new King of the Dunedain returns — monarchy, mythic return, and a reference to the Matter of Britain. Clichés are an extension of this — but are not reliable markers of what to expect, save as much as the author is offhandedly (and possibly erroneously) implying. The entire notion of “Noble Savage” or “Yellow Peril” is grounded within a fairly specific Western and Euro-centric perspective, which creates them as the “Other” in opposition to the imagined writer and reader, as described by Edward Said in Orientalism, in which the definition of the Orient was done as a way to indirectly define the characteristics and qualities of the Occident — the West. In this sense, the continuation of clichés from the broader culture into the specific realm of science fiction and fantasy should not be unexpected — it is an entirely understandable result of the place of these genres as part of popular (Western) culture. “As above, so below” — a larger cultural pattern is reiterated within a smaller context.
So clichés such as the Magical Negro are themselves recognition of the subaltern status of the group such a character represents, as outlined in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In this sense, “subaltern” status is a reference for the dominant-subordinate relationship between the characters and groups implied by the cliché used in writing. The cliché becomes a referent for that dominant-subordinate relationship — and the great potential within fantasy and science fiction for turning that relationship on its head. What is presumed to be difficult in other genres because of a need to remain grounded in a “real world” is where these genres have freedom to escape that stricture and say something new. With this in mind, the danger of using clichés is that they are reinforcing a presumed relationship which is both unequal and oversimplified. This doesn’t just happen with nationality and race, but also gender — which famously has been the subject of considerable debate within the science fiction and fantasy community [4], as well as more recently within the realm of computer games — ask any female gamer about choice of characters and interactions in computer games, all as part of a larger social debate about who “owns” computer games as a hobby. Or sexual orientation — recent debates within the computer gaming hobby are themselves echoes of earlier debates about whether or not non-heterosexual characters in fantasy and science fiction could be anything more than clichés themselves. All of these issues provide frames of reference and meaning for those encountering stories and games — meaning derived from the experiences of the real world, and are therefore reinforced through what we read and what we play.
The danger lies in separating those frames of reference from the entire process of writing fantasy and science fiction, detaching context from the shape of the story and its background, justified with a wave of the hand and an airy “it’s just fantasy, it doesn’t have to be real.” In so doing, the entire basis for truly understanding the connections between the story and the real world becomes obviated, and therefore there is no need to question clichés in any meaningful way. Clichés instead turn into touchstones of familiarity, without any real urgency to the deeper, more problematic issues raised by their appearance in the story. We end up being left with a sense of dissatisfaction with recycled tropes and ideas, as mentioned by Annelee Newitz, writing about the movie Avatar: “But it is nevertheless a story that revisits the same old tropes of colonization. Whites still get to be leaders of the natives — just in a kinder, gentler way than they would have in an old Flash Gordon flick or in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars novels.”
The entire idea of subverting clichés into something new is a way to provide a perspective for whatever the cliché itself was oversimplifying. Subverting clichés in that sense becomes a radical act if done right. To stand a cliché on its head and to re-present it subversively creates an opportunity to give voice to something previously not heard. While this kind of writing does not automatically result in deeper meaning or a more nuanced perspective, it does suggest a difference in perspective which can represent something more. In the specific case of clichéd characters, the subversion of the cliché is recognition of their existence as the “other” — with the implied suggestion of who the reader is supposed to identify with also similarly upended. And this particular re-connection is important, especially when considering the real-world context from which characters are drawn — frames such as class, race, gender, background, ability status, age, sexual orientation are not just identifiers but provide deeper meaning for the story as a whole. Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward provide excellent advice for writers on how to do this, in their slim volume Writing the Other: A Practical Approach. Rather than “writing what you know” Shawl and Ward suggest that there is a great deal to be gained from writing about those you might not know, and how to do this well. There is also a growing body of online writing addressing these issues, much of which is accessible and worth reading.
So where does this leave us? What should be done about clichés? If we get better at spotting them, it becomes easier to reward good storytelling and avoid bad storytelling. More importantly, this supports and encourages the very thing that science fiction and fantasy — and speculative writing in gaming of all sorts — says that it is about: using our imaginations to envision something truly different. This is good for readers, as we get literature and games and media that show the truly diverse world we already exist in, as well as taking the next step to show us worlds which are truly different and amazing.
Works Cited & Further Reading
Anderson, Benedict, 1991. Imagined Communities. Verso.
Chiang, Desdemona, October 5th 2015. “Why The Mikado is Still Problematic: Cultural Appropriation 101.” Web. Date accessed here: month/year.
Jones, Diana Wynne, 2006. The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, Firebird Travel, Penguin Books (USA) Inc.
Hines, Jim C., May 1st, 2014. “Diversity, Appropriation, and Writing the Other” <
http://www.jimchines.com/2014/05/diversity-appropriation/>.
Labalestier, Justine, 2002. The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction. Wesleyan University Press.
Le Guin, Ursula K., 1973. “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie”, The Language of the Night, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York.
Malzberg, Barry N., 1982. Engines of the Night. Doubleday, New York.
Narayan, Uma, 1997. Dislocating Cultures. Routledge.
Newitz, Annalee, December 18th, 2009 “When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like ‘Avatar’?”
ReAppropriate, Spetember 15th 2015. “It’s Time to Reinvent ‘The Mikado’ Without the Racism”
Said, Edward W., 1979. Orientalism. Vintage Books.
Shawl, Nisi and Cynthia Ward, 2009. Writing the Other: A Practical Approach. Aquaduct Press.
Wainaina, Binyavanga, 19th January 2006. “How To Write About Africa” Granta 92.
Footnotes
[1] “Why The Mikado is Still Problematic: Cultural Appropriation 101” Howlround.com, Desdemona Chiang, 10/5/2015, http://howlround.com/why-the-mikado-is-still-problematic-cultural-appropriation-101 and “It’s Time to Reinvent “The Mikado” Without the Racism” ReAppropriate, 9/15/2015, http://reappropriate.co/2015/09/its-time-to-reinvent-the-mikado-without-the-racism/
[2] In his interesting but flawed examination of the evolution of science fiction and its relationship to fantasy, Engines of the Night¸ published in 1982.
[3] Whether or not this is merely an implied or explicit supposition of the author is outside the scope of this essay, however...
[4] A more in-depth examination of the history of this can be found in Justine Larbalestier’s The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction, published in 2002 from Wesleyan University Press.
Tropes as Erasers: A Transgender Perspective
Keffy R. M. Kehrli
TW: This essay includes frank discussion of anti-trans tropes, rapes, murders, and hate crimes. Additionally, if you Google “Tropes about Transgender people,” you are likely to end up on a WordPress site named “TransgenderTropes101.” This is a hate site and is best avoided.
I grew up without any transgender representation of any depth or value. To be fair, I also grew up with very little cisgender queer representation of any depth or value, either. There were oblique references, but typically not in the media that I was given to consume as a child. The references in adult media were filtered through daytime talk shows or the Rush Limbaugh-listening parents of friends. Or jokes. Or that one extremely pitiful-to-my-memory gay guy in As Good As It Gets. (My own parents are considerably more liberal, but left LGBTQ discussions for, “well, that’s a thing that happens to other people’s children.”)
Until I was 20 and wandered away from my college campus to meet the locals who practically lived in an independent coffee shop a mile or so away, my experiences of trans people were limited to:
* Jokes and/or whispers I overheard about how so-and-so got a sex change. (Always trans women.)
* Maury Povich episodes. (Also always trans women.)
“But, Keffy,” I can hear some of you say, having correctly done the math and knowing I’m not that old, “what about Boys Don’t Cry? Wasn’t that about a trans man?”
Well, yes. I didn’t watch that because the film didn’t sound interesting to me, just depressing. I had no idea that it was about a trans man because it was described to me as, “A movie about a girl who pretends to be a boy and gets murdered.” Since Brandon Teena was played by Hilary Swank, that seemed like a likely description. I didn’t know that Boys Don’t Cry was about a trans man until after I had come out.
In any case, it had not even occurred to me that it was possible to be trans male — transgender people were exclusively trans feminine in my experience — until I was in a group of comic artists discussing gender, and one of them said, “Yeah, but you identify as female, right?”
Two things happened. First, I stammered out some “well, I don’t know” answer because I had honestly never considered that I got a say in the matter of my own gender up until that point. And, second, after it sank in over a few days, I felt like I had crawled out of bed one morning to discover that I had no face. You see, I knew how to function as a gender defying young woman. I’d carved out an existence within the versions of womanhood opened up by feminism in which I felt it my duty to fight for any masculinity I wanted. I had models, though sometimes flawed, of women who had gone before me. Women who flipped the finger to the universe, picked up their beakers or strapped on their flight goggles and did what they needed to do.
I had no models for what a trans man was, except the vague unease that in order to be myself, I was going to have to betray feminism.
Thankfully, I found friends who were trans male, and in the grand tradition of being queer in a hostile world, they were my role models, flawed as they were. I’ve been continuously surprised since the mid-oughts, however, that the stereotype common within LGBTQ circles is that all trans men transitioned as children and are the most beloved in university campus queer communities. This was not my experience. When I visited the LGBTQ group at my university, I sat and talked to a couple of lesbians who could not wait to get rid of me. I didn’t go back.
Feeling newly lost as I grew into my 20s had made representation of trans people outside the typical expectations a major issue to me. I was late in understanding myself because there was no room for me in the world. Trans people seemed to exist entirely within stereotypes and tropes: only trans women exist, trans women are jokes, trans women are liars, trans men aren’t real, trans men all pass as cisgender men and have since they were children.
Tropes about groups of people (trans people, women, people of color, etc.) can affect the way others see us. They can also affect the way we see ourselves. Or, in my case, if we see ourselves. If the only models we have for the world are these tropes and stereotypes and we don’t fit those, then what are we?
Transition isn’t magic: simple, one-step transition as a trope.
I was partly disappointed and partly relieved when I started to research transition and found out that it’s an open-ended process rather than an event. Among the uneducated, transition is often discussed as a “sex change surgery.” Transition can seem sudden if you’re a cisgender person who isn’t within the circle of trusted friends and family who hear about the impending transition ahead of time. There have been moments when I wished it was that simple, that it was a single surgery and you were just done, forever. Never needing to give myself another testosterone injection would be awesome.
The reality of transition is that it’s a process that has different goals, outcomes, and time-frames depending on the person undergoing it. Physical transition of one’s body is not an overnight event and is not desired by every trans person. When physical transition is required, the medical procedures chosen depend on the goals of the trans person and, unfortunately, their financial or medical means.
In fiction, however, the nuance is often lost. Gender Swap, Magical Sex Changes, replacement bodies, and the like have been a part of modern science fiction for decades. The magical Gender Swap frequently plays out in which someone magically wakes up in the “wrong” body. Magical Sex Changes involve a trans character being gifted the “right” body (meaning, indistinguishable from a cisgender body). Science fiction takes on these tropes usually by postulate replacement bodies, virtual reality existences, or “perfected” gender confirmation surgeries. There are similar tropes (although broken down differently than I do here) listed on the website TV Tropes as Easy Sex Change and Gender Bender.
Although the magical transition can be used to examine gender dysphoria, these are often stories written by and for cisgender people. The Gender Swap story is also typically about a cisgender character who has sudden
ly been shoved into a body with secondary sex characteristics of the “opposite” gender. The ensuing story is typically extremely binary and gender essentialist, with that little dash of fantasy or science fiction to make it interesting. Genitalia are typically obsessed over, almost to the exclusion of anything else.
This is also a trope that is often played for humorous purposes. For some reason, people don’t seem to be able to get over the apparent hilarity of gender play, much as they still laugh at fart jokes. The joke here, of course, is something along the lines of cis men joking that if they suddenly woke up in a female body, they’d never stop playing with their breasts! Or cis women joking that if they woke up with a dick for a day, they’d write their names in the snow and jerk off for ten hours straight. Or, whatever.
This trope generally bears little resemblance to reality for most trans people and erases the real difficulties and decisions that we end up facing when we decide to transition, to whichever degree we decide to do so. Very few of us are able to pull off a rapid, let alone instantaneous, transition from one gender to another without a stage in which we don’t “pass” as cis. Some of us never “pass” as cisgender no matter what we do. Not all of us want to. The instant shift from male to female (or female to male) in which nobody ever questions the gender of the person in question on either side of the magical transition feels extremely unlike the reality that myself and many of my trans or non-binary friends face. I’m not arguing here that every story featuring a transgender character needs to discuss that character’s transition in detail. It’s the trope in which these problems are actively waved away by the author that bothers me.