Cold, Dull, Dreary Activists
Adventures of Activist Stereotype Unmasker
Activist Stereotype Unmasker is on a mission to kindly but firmly point out that the all-too-common disrespect of social justice activists in fiction (in US dominant narrative spaces) is not okay. Plus ideas for preferable portrayals.
I like my novels not too edgy, not the kind that keep me up at night (in fact, I “listen” myself to sleep). I do order books from left-leaning publishers, but consume much of my daily/nightly fiction fare from the digital offerings of my public library, mostly the librarians’ recommendations.
What does this have to do with fiction featuring activists?
Not nearly enough, unfortunately. It’s very rare to encounter activist main characters or stories focused on social movements in mainstream fiction (and they’re not all that common in leftwing fiction, either), even when activism is clearly called for in the situations posed. I speculate about why that is in this article.
For an exception proving the rule, check out this week’s Fiction Featuring Activists Fridays post, focused on the one positive YA portrayal of the US anti-Vietnam War movement among a crowded field of negatively stereotyping ones.
Yet activists do turn up at times in mainstream stories—but nearly always as minor mentions, often dismissive if not downright negative.
I noticed this once again this week, while reading two otherwise enjoyable books plucked straight off the library virtual recommendations shelf.
One was by an old favorite of mine, Maeve Binchy, who gets bumped up to top spot in March because she’s Irish. The other is an entertaining story by Seressia Glass called “The Love Con.” Set in the world of cosplaying, my daughter ‘s longtime hobby, it caught my eye when it appeared among the library recommendations.
In “Whitethorn Woods,” a character’s sister is described as living with a couple of “feminists.” When the sister critiques the character’s lifestyle he counters by saying, “As if her life with these two dull women who all wore organic clothes and ate organic food and talked organic talk was somehow less drear.”1
I roll my eyes. How often do I have to read about feminists described as hard-nosed, self-righteous, and dull. Oh yes, and drear. And why is so much scorn heaped upon organic things—especially, for some reason, granola?
In “ The Love Con,” by Seressia Glass, Kenya, the main character, mentions a guy she had been dating, who was “educated, [had a] decent job, fine, committed to the cause and the community.” However, Kenya continues, there were…”warning signs, like how cold he was to her mixed group of friends, the tone and content of his social media postings, how his cosplays were always about “sending a message.”2 We hear no more about this man, but this brief reference is enough for readers to connect him with menacing Black militancy.
And yet, Kenya struggles against racism throughout the book, but as a feisty, warm individual, not as part of the cause or the community, let alone the broader anti-racist movement.
Let me say once again that Stereotype Unmasker and I like both authors and both books, as we like many others. If these examples were one-offs, I could be accused of nitpicking. But dismissive stereotyping of people who devote themselves to social justice, especially if they also pursue a lifestyle according to these principles—e.g., eat organic food—is everywhere.
Such stereotyping is often fleeting—you don’t notice a couple drops of it dripping straight into your brain to further thicken the hidden stalagmite of your unconscious prejudices. But these stereotypes are so pervasive it takes a mere mention to activate them without our even being aware of it. “Everyone knows” activists are self-righteous, humorless, angry, doctrinaire… Yes, even those of us who are activists ourselves have this in our minds.
Unmasking stereotyping of activists in fiction is a long road—but, as always, it begins with a step: paying attention. Perk up your ears when you come across characters in novels, movies, TV shows and other forms of fiction, who are striving for social change for the environment, workplace, human rights, animal rights. Note how these folks are portrayed. Notice whether readers are invited to empathize with them or if you find yourself repelled by or, at best, not drawn to identifying with them. Notice if you’re being nudged to consider them as “other.”
In other words, be aware if the author has—even without deliberate intent—given them a stereotyping mask.
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Binchy, Maeve. Whitethorn Woods. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Ebook edition., p. 279.
The Love Con, Penguin Random House Audio, 2021, Part 2, Chapter 5, 4:46-4:14.
You could publish a poll of reader-submitted faves. One that jumps to mind is a book that was made into a film about the WWII heroine Noor Inayat Khan, daughter of a famous Sufi leader, a pacifist, who felt so strongly called to support the War effort in the UK where her family had migrated she learned to operate the wireless (telegraph) from France, where she had been dropped from a plane. I have her biography by Shrabani Basu (there are others, see the books listed at the bottom here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noor_Inayat_Khan) and I first found out about her in the film, _A Call to Spy_. One of the tenderest references for me as a Jew by birth and a Sufi beloved is this piece, which includes her: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/09/08/meet-the-muslims-who-sacrificed-themselves-to-save-jews-and-fight-nazis-in-world-war-ii/