So, I\u2019ve started reading a recently-published book that is set in a sort of pseudo-Renaissance Europe\u2014all the places have different names and so forth, but it\u2019s clear from both the map and correlations with our actual history that this is an alternate Three Musketeers. And there\u2019s a thing that is making me uneasy that I wanted to discuss with y\u2019all, if you\u2019d like. I\u2019m only a hundred pages or so in to the book, so I am not going to mention the title and author just in case my concerns are addressed later in the book and I am being unfair. But I think this sort of thing happens more generally, these days, and it may be interesting to talk about generally, rather than specifically.\r\n
So, this is an alternate world, with magic and whatnot, right? And evidently this world does not have a history of patriarchy, as positions of power and influence are held by men and women without anyone seeming to feel the need to comment on either being unusual. That includes positions of political power, military rank, academic preferment and also what I will call pseudo-Church office. Neither men nor women seem to face a gender-based barrier to advancement in any field. (We haven\u2019t yet met any characters who are neither men nor women, at least to my knowledge, nor have we met any captains of industry or finance so far.)\r\n
There also appears to be no history of racial animosity or oppression based on skin color. The physical descriptions of the characters indicate shades of coloration that might perhaps be associated with what we in our world call \u201craces\u201d (or some of us do, anyway) but they do not appear to correlate in any way with social power. Nor does anyone react to a person\u2019s appearance by associating them with any oppressed or minoritized group. Those with darker skin appear to face no barriers to advancement, any more than those who present as women.\r\n
In other words, there is tremendous diversity in this book\u2014the Three Musketeers are not all white men!\u2014but also in an odd way, not.\r\n
No-one in the book has the experience of gender-based or race-based marginalization; no-one in the book has the experience of gender-based or race-based privilege. It feels<\/i> to me, quite a bit, as if everyone<\/i> is white and male, despite almost all of them explicitly not being either.\r\n
There\u2019s also religion\u2014but the magic in this book is connected to an established Church (more or less, I\u2019m summarizing) so that makes the notion of competing sects or minority religions very difficult. I mean, if the Deity is regularly performing miracles for the priests, it wouldn\u2019t be surprising that there isn\u2019t some competing religion to be either vilified or tolerated. Why would there be?\r\n
Digression<\/i>: Unsurprisingly, the Church in the book does very little of what an established Church does in our world. It\u2019s rare to have a pseudo-priest-analogue in a fantasy story that is at all concerned with liturgy, regular prayer services, instruction, pastoral care, record-keeping, care of ritual objects and Scripture study. I\u2019m not really complaining about that, as that\u2019s a pretty small little niche market I would think, and most books would not be significantly improved by detailing our hero\u2019s daily presence at a pseudo-Mass or having to wait for the local cleric who has gone round to Havistock\u2019s place, where the old sinner is like to die any day now and his grandson not baptised. And even less with the events encompassing a synod where the main point of discussion is a possible change in the calendar that would regularize the observance of a particular feast day. I mean, there are some of us who read both Victorian novels and Speculative Fiction, but generally we are looking for difference Sources of Reader Pleasure in those genres. End Digression.\r\n
So, on the one hand, I feel like the book is engaging in a kind of erasure, an odd deracination that makes the superficial diversity problematic. But on the other hand, is it not kind of cool to imagine a world without a history of white or male supremacy? There\u2019s a kind of awesomeness to it, honestly\u2014the kick-ass women are just kick-ass women without having to overcome prejudice. People really are color-blind when it comes to skin tones, and can be color-blind without themselves doing further injury to an already marginalized people. Any reader can identify with any character, seeing themselves<\/i> in positions of power or weakness, masculinity or femininity, heroism or villainy, black skin or brown or reddish or pink.\r\n
Which is kinda the White Dude\u2019s vision of diversity, innit? Or is it?\r\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,<\/I>
-Vardibidian.\r\n[\/raw]\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger is uneasy.","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20169"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20169\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20172,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20169\/revisions\/20172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}