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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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There is a phenomenon i notice in media but never hear named. Call it, "Representation As Inherently Problematic."

Examples: There are no mentally handicapped people or trans people on shows that are not specifically about these topics. The reasons for this for mental disabilities are fairly obvious: mental handicaps are considered intrinsically undignified. If you show a mentally handicapped person doing or saying something dumb on a show, this counts as mocking a protected group. Thus: total absence.

Similarly: If you have a trans person on a show you need to make it clear to the audience they are trans, which either requires it to be a plot point (making it a sort of Very Special Episode) or making the trans person not pass (which is undignified and thus opens the writers up to criticism.) Thus: total absence.

Similarly, morbid obesity is undignified, and the morbidly obese are close to being a protected class (being as it is a physical disability). Thus, having them on a show is undignified and opens up the writers to criticism. Thus: total absence.

Another example: land o' lakes mascot, a native American woman, gets criticism for being stereotypical, which is synonymous to being visually identifiable as a native american. So she was removed from the labeling.

Another: Dr. Seuss gets criticism for visually identifiable depiction of a Chinese villager; book gets pulled as a result.

A similar-feeling phenomenon is This Character Has Some Characteristics Of A Protected Group, Which Is Kinda Like Being A Standin For That Group, Making That Character's Poor Qualities A Direct Commentary On That Group. Examples: criticisms around Greedo and Jar Jar Binks being racist caricatures; criticisms of goblin representation in Harry Potter as being anti-semitic caricatures.

Some of the (very left/progressive) authors I follow do talk about how sufficient representation is necessary for them to have more complex diverse characters, as opposed to aggressively averting tropes/stereotypes. To the point of one author saying they definitely were never going consider killing off $SPECIFIC_REPRESENTATION (in a book where the majority of the named characters died) because meeting those representation points was so rare. Having characters match stereotypes too closely is a lot less problematic if there's enough characters around in those categories that there's some around that don't match those same stereotypes.

This is part of why "token" representation is considered problematic, although calling representation "token" usually also implies that no real though has been put into the representation past sticking a label on a character that would otherwise be indistinguishable from a character without that label.

Yeah, i'm thinking primarily of types of representation where the protected characteristics are, themselves, the problematic attributes causing the characteristic to be totally absent. Mentally handicapped folks, the obese, and visibly trans women (in non-very special episodes) are the main examples i can think of for this.