Thoughts For No Reason Whatsoever I'm Sure

[superborb]

1. Diaspora vs Chinese-from-China feelings on culture. Growing up diaspora means living through racism that completely colors the perspective -- it's hard to explain why wearing qipao as a costume is A Problem or cultural appropriation broadly to people who haven't had the experience of it being uncool and othering when you do something and then cool when a white person does it. From someone who grew up in the dominant culture, it just seems like a good thing that people are interested, right?

Anyway, this leads to a feeling (a logical one!) of possessiveness over the tidbits of culture that you can claim for yourself.

2. The nuances of cultural erasure for a canon that was created by the dominant ethnicity and culture of Somewhere Else. As point 1 says, I highly doubt Chinese-from-China would feel as possessive over MDZS/CQL as diaspora fans do. They have many canons that reflect their world; as diaspora, there is relatively few canons that speak to the Chinese diaspora experience. So we attach ourselves to the things we can see a glimmer of ourselves in, in familiar faces, even though we aren't really their target audience.

I personally don't like most modern AUs or really, fic that gets too removed from the Chinese roots of the canon and just /feels/ wrong. It's just not what I enjoy reading. But I'd argue that it's way more erasure to celebrate [insert vaguely often American modern AU here] through its ubiquity and influence on the fandom. I know I fall more on the "this is a transformative works" fandom side of things generally, though I also know that fic and fandom can be deeply racist. But blanket bans on what kind of transformative works are permissive... MDZS/CQL are out there in the world! We can't erase it by any fanworks.

I do fully understand /why/ people are uncomfortable with certain transformations, I just think that in the absence of criticism of transformations that are similar, it leads to point 3.

3. I am so, so, so uncomfortable with anti-Semitism in a world where the alt right is resurging. Adding to the previous tweets I made a while back, characterizing Jews as "greedy," "taking over" are clearly dogwhistles. Please, I beg you, do not. The double standard where Christian AUs don't get backlash? Also seriously anti-Semitic.

As a nonreligious person who grew up in the US, where Christian Chinese are common, I absolutely 100% really do not like Christian AUs. And hey-- I can skip them when they're tagged. The fic getting backlashed was tagged as AU and Jewish from the very beginning.

In conclusion, I don't really want to be ~discourse all the time~ like I feel like I've been recently. I wanted to do two things: a. to push back on the narrative of "you're pushing out diaspora folks!" a bit and b. leave an opening for my ideal, a more nuanced discussion about why certain things feel like erasure and certain things do not. I think it would be revealing.

Comments

[superborb]

La, between the comments my friends have made that they're getting the "backlash against all of us" feeling very strongly AND the very obvious antisemitic tropes that even I can see, I would strongly recommend that you not look too much at this discourse.

I wish we could have these interesting points without this... *handwaves* associated mess.

[ilanala]

I mean, I freely recognize that the fear of backlash is partly (understandable) paranoia based on history and past experiences, but I'm seeing a lot of comments coming at this from the POV of "Jews are basically just privileged (possibly extra privileged) white people." That POV underlies a lot of antisemitism I've encountered in recent years so seeing it pushed in these discussions, however unconsciously, definitely puts me on edge.

It sounds like the authors of both fics that triggered these arguments have responded poorly and at least some people got racist about it and that's not good either. It sucks that instead of having valid conversations about cultural erasure and fanfic transformations (and also just better understanding the culture underlying MDZS), we get bogged down in people fundamentally misunderstanding each other and, at least in some cases, not wanting to try.

[superborb]

Yes, there's been a lot of... explaining Judaism from non-Jewish white people which is weirding me out. A lot of well, Jewish people are white, right? Which is really frustrating.

That definitely did NOT help yeah. There's definitely bad actors who were out and out racist AND actors who were out and out anti-semitic, and they make it really hard to engage with other people thoughtfully.

[ilanala]

The whiteness of Jewish people is a complicated question and something that has been weaponized against us in the modern social justice era (basically "You look white and therefore must not be oppressed in any way, let alone be the target of white supremacists, and you wanting to talk about antisemitism is just white fragility/centering whiteness"). So even the way people are talking about that in this context makes me nervous and also makes me feel like a lot of the Chinese diaspora people involved are assuming that the Jewish experience is very different from theirs because Jews are white, right? And it is different in some ways but not in others (especially if you're not a very assimilated, multi-generational American Jew), which makes it particularly a shame that these clashes are happening.

(That tweet in your thread that I felt compelled to reply to was, however innocently it may have been intended, sounding a lot like Khazar Theory which is a whole antisemitic myth about Ashkenazi Jews being fake European converts that has been used to justify a lot of nasty stuff, so...yeah. There's a lot going on that people probably don't see if they don't know what to look for and that makes it hard.)

[superborb]

Yes! I think the problem is that there's a lot of dogwhistles that people are either willfully ignoring or are too ignorant to know about (and don't care to learn about!), so it's like a minefield...