Mild despair goes here:

[tiamatschild]

But can't depictions of queer people be real and honest and affirming without revolving on said queer people's love lives?

/probably unfair rhetorical question

Comments

[aldanise]

I sympathize. There are a lot of things about being queer that do not involve love lives or angst, which seem to be the dominant narratives. (And, you know, I'm including straight people's love lives in the former category.)

*looks at her old queer history textbooks* Maybe I should stick to nonfiction for a while...

[tiamatschild]

Yeah. The courtship/romance plots are totally valid, but they're not the only plots in the world! Sometimes I think some of it is because queer people are so heavily defined by our sexualities in cultural terms that a lot of people seem to feel like... if the sexuality isn't the center of the plot (which means romance or sex or persecution because when you're queer persecution = sex = angst = circle back around to persecution/sex) the character/s aren't queer anymore.

Nonfiction is so surprising! History's full of counter-narratives, I love it. I'm really only writing non-fiction right now, and it's making me so happy. Even if I do then find myself wanting to write fiction and not having time.

[aldanise]

Counter-narratives, indeed! One of the reasons I love studying premodern history so much is that modern conceptions of what it means to be "normal" don't fit at all, and the best queer historians do an awesome job of teasing out how that shows up in history.

What sort of nonfiction are you writing, if I may ask?

[tiamatschild]

*nodnodnod* Yeeees.

I'm working on my undergraduate history thesis! (And a whole bunch of excruciating exercises for a required English class - but those don't count, they're not fun.) So I'm working on an article about the effect of eugenicist rhetoric and eugenicist bans on marriage for people with certain disabilities on the people who fell into those categories in the U.S. between 1900 and 1920. There's all these problems to be solved with how to put the thing together, and I've got so much talk about and explain because there's essentially no historiography on the subject. But there is this whole wealth of things I'm learning, and all kinds of really fascinating people who appear in court, and questions I want to pursue later.

It's really interesting, and rather less endlessly depressing than it sounds, since my time period's kind of a transition moment in a lot of ways, so in lots of the court cases I'm examining, the person with the disability succeeds in defining his/her marriage as legitimate.

[aldanise]

Ooh, exciting! I'm surprised at the lack of historiography, since it sounds like a perfect testing ground for the many theories about government and social definitions of "normal".

(I'm kind of jealous; you sound like you're getting to use so many primary sources!)

[ilthit]

*cough* queerlygen *cough

It's definitely because being queer is considered unusual, so why would the character be written queer unless it was a major part of the plot? Writing courses tend to say that nothing should happen that doesn't move the plot along (at least in films - in books this would be terrible advice) and I guess people just expand on it to mean that if a character is unusual there must be a plot point tied to the ways they are unusual.

I actually tend to have trouble thinking of queerlygen storylines, because unless I use a character who is queer in canon, how are you supposed to present them as queer in the fic without it feeling pasted on? Of course you could have a romantic subplot or partner for a sexual minority and still keep the focus of the story elsewhere; and stories about gender minorities are another thing entirely.