beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

I am a science fiction geek, and I am a cultural studies student, and when these things get together this usually involves words like 'discourses' and being very academic about science fiction. But sometimes it involves being very SF about culture. So, I have a theory:

isms suck, like gravity
therefore orbital mechanics is a good way to conceptualise the interaction of texts and isms

For the purpose of this theory an 'ism' is a big accumulation of ideas.
The ones that tend to bring things to grief are racism, sexism, ablism, classism, and heterosexism.
And probably some other things that don't end with ism, because language isn't convenient like that. But.

There are some signifiers that accumulate other ideas around them in complicated structures.
So 'woman' or 'black' forms the core of a complex made up of every text connected to them, be that single utterances (proverbs, throwaway remarks) or story cycles (greek myths, bible stories.)
The initial symbol is like the Racnoss ship forming the center of the earth. There's one big spiky thing in the middle there somewhere, and then all those tiny little dust specks and the larger lumpy rocks all drift together.
The big lumps are statements that you can see being hurtful. You know if they crunch into you those are going to do damage. They're the 'women/blacks are born inferior' size statements, and we counter them with 'all men are created equal' and call that the new obvious. But even then it crunches into old troubles, because 'men' and 'humans' and 'people' are symbols that interact in complex ways with each other and with 'women'.
Usually if people get in arguments it starts out being about the big lumps.
But the dust is also sifting down, sure and steady, and ends up a large part of the accumulation. The kind of small remarks you don't hardly think of or notice drift together and end up weighing huge amounts.
So there we have it, planets formed. And in the case of isms those planets are accumulated from such hurtful stuff we're all struggling to get away from it.

Isms have gravity. Sure, you might be strolling along in some comfortable orbit, or finding the surface a pleasant place to live, and never have to think about it. But the people closer to the initial symbol are being buried by all that other junk.
They're trying to dig their way out, push away the old rubbish. Some people further from the symbol try and help them, weighed down less but still looking at the others. It's slow, tedious, repetitive and difficult work. After a while you end up thinking, if someone spills so much as one more pan of dust around here... *grrrr* And as to people dropping rocks...

So say these planets formed in the long-ago. Say we're talking pre-existing structures. They're floating there, massive accumulations of layer upon layer of this hurtful heavy stuff, different layers changing in specifics but all of them together meant to keep the core symbol down there.

Now you want to create a new text.

Say you've got a muse of fire, out there illuminating things from empty space. Feels like flying, so you ignore that whole 'gravity' thing, don't think about the isms, and just say what you say. Look, your text exists in a vacuum, why should it worry about all those rocks?

You plot - a course, a journey, a story - you set out along that plot, you expect it to sail smoothly to where you want to be, your chosen meaning.

If you plot, plan, speak as if you exist in empty space, planet size isms will take you by surprise. You might never have seen them before - they're far from all the symbols that apply to you, you never thought of that one until now. Or you have seen them, but you think we should be ism-blind, color blind, say 'race' or 'gender' or all the rest aren't relevant symbols. That sounds like a great idea - blow up the central idea, destroy that sucky planet, get everyone free! But, basically, that hasn't happened yet. And even if it does, planet go boom just results in a lot of rocks in unexpected places. It'll take a while for free space to in fact be free. But either kind of blind - ignorant or hopeful - you set out a straight line push in a complex interaction of gravity wells and you're going to, at best, go all kinds of wonky. At worst you'll crash smash into one of them. And the people underneath that crash will not appreciate it.

And one trouble is that timing here is key. A statement like 'stupid people are stupid' or 'angry people are nicer when calm' means little taken alone, floating out there in the empty. But in the context, near the orbit, of an ism... if the weighty discourse/discussion is happening in your area right now? Smash.

And once an ism has dragged you off your chosen course it isn't any good to say 'but I was going thataway!' and ignore it. All those people pointing out that in fact you've interacted with some sucky ideas over here are being helpful, if you wanted to get your story/statement or idea over to where you wanted it to be. If you get told some rogue ism has swung past unexpectedly and grabbed your statement in, what you need is a course correction. 'I didn't mean it' doesn't push in any new direction. You've got to push off strongly away from the ism, if you don't want to smack right into it. Say with a new statement like 'stupid people happen in all varieties, and so do smart people, and this ism here weighs down some of those smart ones unfairly'. Or, you know, a better way of saying that. Saying where you meant to go doesn't get you there on its own.

Isms might look like these small compact things far away, but they suck so hard they probably pull everything you're saying around even from there. And there's lots of them, so they pull in lots of directions at once. And, because a metaphor is not physics, you can in fact crash into several of them at once.

So, I am studying up on this symbol system I find myself living in, and trying to find the sucky bits, so I can steer around them.

Going 'lalala I shall make a straight line! ...oops' is pretty much how those isms just keep on getting bigger.