Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

You aren't wrong. I try to stand by Debbie but there is a limit to how many times I'm capable of doing so, in part because I do not agree with the absolutist argument coming from one section of the appropriation debate (and because I bitterly resent being labelled "white" by Americans who know sod all about the position of the UK Jewish community--and please don't use the example you do, it's so often used against me, also, pause and consider how many Jewish protagonists you can think of in children's literature, where the book isn't about being Jewish. I can think of one, and another book where the best friend is Jewish and the high point of her school term is playing an angel in the nativity play.)

The isssue I think is that most LJ ers in fandom, even if they are not "academically trained" are by nature critical readers: they veer towards close reading approaches and a demand for authenticity. Furthermore, sf and fantasy are intensely political genres--they often wear their politics on their sleeves--so they both attract and train political thinkers.

On childlit the range of approaches is much more diverse. In some cases it is so attuned to "do kids like it" that I can simply not hold a conversation (because it begins from the idea that all kids are the same and just like them). I landed on a panel like this at the Denver world con and wanted to crawl under the table from embarrassment. This basic position extends out to create all sorts of privilege beginning with white privilege, working through gender (girls are being privileged as readers), class, and on into privileging fiction, and oddly I think this last one is part of the problem, because if one constantly insists that "story" is why kids read, then "the stuff they find out from story" is less important and doesn't have to be checked. In the sf and fantasy world, "the stuff we find out from story" is at least as important as story, and for many readers, more so, so if an author gets it wrong, the reader feels betrayed (as I did with I, Coriander).

And I think I have actually just worked out for myself why we are discussing this so much in sf and fantasy: we aren't more liberal, we are just more "fact" oriented and we want to "know". It makes us more predisposed to listening, even if (with are white privilege) we sometimes balk and become the problem.

This isn't me patting ourselves on the back; a number of outsiders have commented on the way sf fans tend to say thank you if corrected in pronounciation or a matter of fact. We don't get embarrassed and don't see it is a humilation (which has protected me in more than one work context).