Words of Wood

I've completed seven weeks of teacher training, and am starting a school placement on Monday. Hilariously, I feel way less prepared than I did in September -- the more I know, the more I know I don't know &etc.

It's been a good term. Really good. I mean, it's been endless seminars and trying to work out what the hell "reflective writing" actually MEANS to your tutor's mark scheme, and crying at midnight because of not having enough extended reading journal entries and drowning in acronyms and buzzwords and educational policy...

...but I'm good at it. This has actually surprised me. I am our group's mascot for nerdiness and tutors have stopped calling on me in maths and computing and science "to give someone else a turn." I've been told by several people in my group that they find me slightly terrifying (and I've given so many explanations to my coursemates of how academic papers work and how you put refs in writing and what the point of an abstract is), and my endless repertoire of Useless Facts are actually really useful in lesson planning and discussing curricula!

I'm bragging, yep. But I can't tell you guys how good it feels to be good at my work again. Oxford crushed me and made me feel stupid and inadequate all of the time and stopped me being able to read novels and I never really recovered. I started my Oxford degree seven years ago this week and right up until then my entire definition of self was tied up in being a bookworm, in being clever. I used to find learning so much fun and I adored school and Oxford stripped that all away and I had forgotten how much I missed it. Except now it's even better because there aren't looming exams and expectations and constant suffocating pressure and emotional abuse and I'm properly medicated for the depression that was grinding me down since adolescence. I still smash into walls of despair and awful, but I can climb them now. It's a hard-won skill.

I'm getting really emotional writing this.

It's just. I'm so grateful. I love Brookes, the university Oxford students sneered at for coexisting in their city (where the not good enough, the boring, normal students went). I love studying. I love my volunteering twice a week, with Brownies and Yellow Submarine, and I'm busy and so happy. I was so scared, before I started this course, that I was going to feel stupid all the time again and be overwhelmed and fall apart. But that's not happening. The opposite, in fact.

I'm going to be a teacher, and I'm going to rock.

There is a growing prevalence at the moment for Neal/Diana fic. This upsets me a lot, and I'm going to talk about why.

Disclaimer: I am not censoring anyone (since I am not a government entity, it would be literally impossible for me to do so). It is everyone's personal choice to write what they write. I am just trying to explain why this particular choice is very loaded, and problematic, and capable of hurting people. Not everyone feels like this, obviously. I don't speak on behalf of any group.

(If you're going to comment with YKINMK, or some variety of "don't read, then", please don't bother. I don't need to read the fic to have it glare in my face as I scroll down my flist.)

Diana, you see, identifies as a lesbian, at multiple points in canon. Very clearly and unambiguously. She has expressed her lack of attraction to men in general and to Neal specifically.

Writing her otherwise is erasure.

The obvious (and very tired) retort is "but what about writing straight characters as gay/bi? That happens all the time!"

Firstly, I can only think of two characters I have ever seen who have actually stated themselves to be straight (Pete from Warehouse 13 and John from BBC Sherlock, if you're curious). Because we live in a heterocentric society, characters (and people) are assumed to be straight unless and until they state otherwise. Coming out is hard, and it isn't a one-time event -- if you're lucky enough to have passing privilege you have to come out again, and again, and again, to each new group of people. It's SCARY. Even then, it can be really hard to get people to respect your identity -- think of all the "you just haven't met the right man/woman yet" bullshit.

And secondly: writing a straight or assumed-straight character as queer is an act of subversion. In our heterosexist society, our media suffers deeply from an overabundance of assumed-straight characters, and a lack of meaningful representation for queer people. Taking assumed-straight chars and writing them as queer can be powerful: it's forcing ourselves into spaces which actively try to keep us out. It's saying, We can be main characters. We can be heroes. We belong here.

Taking a gay character, one of the very few textually gay characters, and writing them into a straight relationship is a fucking kick in the teeth. No way to sugar-coat it, I'm afraid, and I don't want to.

I was talking a moment ago about the lack of respect for queer people, and queer identities, and this is a part of that. Writing a gay character in a het relationship does not happen in a vacuum -- it happens in a context where gay characters are already crumbs compared to the spread of assumed-straight characters. Where we all know that creators can and do take them away from us at any moment (Moffat's Irene Adler, I'm looking at you). Where (usually) straight people feel completely justified in continually questioning self-professed queerness, and so many media narratives glorify the gay-identified person finding that they "just happen" to fall in love with someone of the opposite gender. Where "she'd like it if she just tried it" is a meme, one that makes people feel justified into coercing or forcing gay people into sex they don't want. Where we all know that you might not really be gay -- maybe you're just confused, or immature, or waiting for the right man.

There are reasons to write a pairing like Neal/Diana. Because you find the thought of them together hot. Because you enjoy their interactions, and want to write more of them, and a relationship is an easy way of doing that. Because you just feel like it.

There are reasons not to. Because it hurts people to see that one of the few characters they can identify with, that they can count as one of them, other people feel justified in claiming for the over-represented majority instead. Because you respect representations of queer identities. Because, whether you agree with them or not, you realise that writing het ships for gay characters makes people upset and hurt.

You can choose which of those reasons you care the most about. But you ARE making a choice. And you're displaying it in public every time you write this pairing. Please, consider choosing not to.

A note about commenting, since this is the sort of subject this is relevant to: my journal does have anon comments enabled, but they're screened because I keep getting spam. I let non-spam ones through, obviously!

Today is Blogging Against Disablism Day. So I've decided to write a post, after thinking about it for a while. I haven't decided yet whether I dare to submit it to the masterlist of posts, which you can find here. I do encourage you to read at least some of them.

What I'm writing about are attitudes to evidence of self-harm. Since it's May Day, and summer started when we heard the singers from Magdalen Tower, this becomes especially relevant.

( Trigger warning: Discussion of depression and self-harm )

On Monday I'm planning to go to a protest in London. If you're free then you might be interested in coming along too.

(I hate to beg, but: relevant friends in Oxford/London, please may I crash on someone's floor afterwards for the night, if it's not too much bother? The train connections I need to get all the way home in the evening are mostly absent, and it would be a massive help. I can compensate you!)

The protest is against the, quite frankly, evil cuts this government is making to Welfare for people with disabilities - among other things, stating that they have a target of reducing the people who are paid Disability Living Allowance (which is paid regardless of working status, and designed to reflect the additional costs to living associated with having a disability) by 20%. To stop paying Employment Maintainance Allowance after a year (because disabilities totally vanish when there's no money!). To remove mobility payments to people in care homes, meaning that many will become virtual prisioners - these payments are often used by care homes to, eg, fund an accesable minibus, and to provide wheelchairs. Cutting the respite care hours for families, including those where a child takes care of a parent.

None of these measures are going to solve the deficit. They are penny-pinching, and they are going completly against promises made by Cameron during his election campaining, and they are downright evil. They are going to kill people. (I'm not joking.)

You can read an article at The Guardian, here, which sums up the key points pretty neatly, and if you want more details on what specifically is affected, and how, you might like to read some of the posts on Where's The Benefit?, a blog set up in response. Or personal stories on how these cuts are going to have huge and horrible impacts on people on another related blog, One Month Before Heartbreak.

Here is the page with the information about Monday,. I'm nervous about going on my own (outside! in a big city! with strangers!), but to me, after having been following these blogs and reading about the planned cuts for months, I think I have to. This is important.