Writing the Other: Challenges and Risk-Rewards

[polymath]

Writing the Other is a fashionable and growing trend in literature and publishing and social cultures. On one hand, writing the other has exotic appeal; on another hand, has risks from accusations of cultural malappropriation; on the third hand, at least in the U.S., Free Speech makes most anyone and anything fair game for creative writing, the only actionable restrictions being hate speech or immediately proximal incitements of violence. Other countries' laws may protect significant cultures' unique cultural identity and property from malappropriation to varying degrees. Aboriginal cultures, for example.

I'm investigating the bounds, so to speak, of writing the other. Frequent indictments against a man writing about women, for example, a person of one race writing about another, sexual identity, lifestyle, class, status, outward appearances, the list is as ample as the varieties of individual identities.

I started on this journey because I read a narrative in progress that glorified creatively abusing and expoilting a group of people who would be offended as a group by the narrative. Other readers laughed, found it funny, that heavyset people as a stereotype are fair game to generalize about, exploit and abuse for comic irony purposes, and indifferently targets of dehumanization and social demonization.

I realized I was offended, though not a member of the culturally malappropriated group. It took me several months of reflection to weigh why, weigh the pros and cons, the intents and meanings and challenges, risks, rewards of cultural appropriation, the moral and ethical and legal "rights" and "wrongs," privileges, rights, obligations, and responsibilities of writers concerned.

In the end, I realized the core issue wasn't per se the exploitive or abusive cultural malappropriation, but rather the flatness of the dehumanized characters. They were too general, and thus offensive to an entire group, to be taken as unique to individuals, as writing the other is most creatively and artfully expressed. The characters simply weren't portrayed individually enough to be artfully significant.