Sorry, my bad! I thought you were referencing the quoted section illustrating intersections of privilege, which I blocked out during editing, since I was thinking that had made a bigger impression (whether it's okay for this person to write about that topic w/out first-hand experience) when the bulk of the post wasn't really revolving around whether a work is valid based on the author's experience. It seemed on longer thought to be a quoted section that would just muddy the waters.
I get the argument that okay-anything is based on an unrealistic interpretation of a state of being (whether this is female, gay, black, jewish, etc). And I do think that there are plenty of times in which a story does require --as you noted in your first comment -- the inclusion of those negative elements, because that's part of the state of being represented in the story. But I think to deride stories that do not contain those negative elements is too much of a generalization, and that sometimes there's a valid (or at the very least, aspirational) reason behind an author's choice to leave out or set aside or just not see the need to address those negative elements.
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Date: 25 Oct 2010 05:45 pm (UTC)I get the argument that okay-anything is based on an unrealistic interpretation of a state of being (whether this is female, gay, black, jewish, etc). And I do think that there are plenty of times in which a story does require --as you noted in your first comment -- the inclusion of those negative elements, because that's part of the state of being represented in the story. But I think to deride stories that do not contain those negative elements is too much of a generalization, and that sometimes there's a valid (or at the very least, aspirational) reason behind an author's choice to leave out or set aside or just not see the need to address those negative elements.