Avoiding
Stereotypes
Michael
G. Williams, Darin Kennedy, Faith Hunter, Melissa Gilbert, A.J. Hartley
Moderator:
Janine Spendlove
Common Stereotypes They Deal
With
JS: Heroes anthology: “Anything but white dudes in tights.” Also, as
she’s in the marines which are 90% male; she’ll be deployed this summer as a
commander. She feels that she represents all women in the marines because of
the disparity.
AJ: Has a lot of problems of the way people represent the British,
English, and British/English people. Still wrong, and operates on the
assumption that “anything that doesn’t look or sound like me is not real”, not
a fully developed person, etc. Doesn’t like the automatic equate of “You must
live in a thatched cottage, etc”.
MG: She’s an English teacher, so she sees a lot in fiction and nonfiction
of the stereotype that bothers her the most: the dumb hillbilly. A lot of times
people think that because you came from a small town, you can’t be intelligent,
can’t hold a meaningful conversation, and do nothing but make babies with your
cousins.
FH: Doesn’t like the Polyannas. Women being stupid with their strength,
or being weak where they could be strong.
DK: Doesn’t like the damsel in distress; or the sitcom with the
unintelligent overweight husband and the smoking hot wife. (You’d never see the
reverse show). And on the Disney channel, the children are brilliant and the
adults are stupid and the children have to save their parents.
MW: Doesn’t like stereotype that gay men are either super macho bodybuilders
or flamboyant. (“Most of us are both, thank you!”
JS: Worked on Capitol Hill when Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was being
repealed, and the stereotypes and misconceptions, the fears that were going to
arise, among the older generation.
Typical Stereotypes
JS: Let’s discuss the F Bomb: Feminism.
AJ: Someone who thinks that women should have equal rights to men.
JS: Equal rights for everyone. Equal pay.
JS: So what are the stereotypes?
-
Equating man-hating with feminist
-
Has a bumper sticker: “I know I run like a girl.
Try to keep up.”
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Stereotypes with age and the way it’s represented
-
Fanfiction: how everyone was appalled by the
Snape-Harry fanfic, but the Snape-Hermione fanfic was somehow okay
-
Audience comment: Wherever you go, the
underclass, the underprivileged, the assumption that the race is the
assumption, not the situation. (e.g. poor, welfare African Americans or
Hispanics)
-
The concept of the other.
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That the mentally ill are dangerous to others;
usually, they’re a danger to themselves.
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That a learning disability or ADHD is equated
with stupidity, troublemakers
-
NERDS.
It’s okay to be a stereotype if
that’s who you are. But most of us are not. We’re an amalgamation of
everything. But we have stereotype because of laziness, lack of understanding,
and snap judgments.
-
JS: Like I’m the hipster feminist who hates all
men and burns her bra.
-
FH: I used
to burn my bra. I gave that up.
-
JS: I’m
wearing one today. I can’t stand it.
-
AJ: I like
them.
-
JS: Stereotypes exist because of society.
-
MW: Because people prefer the shortest
explanation ever.
-
DK: Because early-on in our development we
needed to identify “this is my tribe, that’s another tribe” – that it’s encoded
in our DNA to look for differences in people.
-
MG: Jungian archetypes. We do it to help ourselves
understand, because in order to learn, we have to connect.
-
Audience comment: The Identification of friend
or foe.
-
FH: When we create characters, the easiest way
is to start with a stereotype and work back from that. If only needed for one
scene and one purpose, you don’t need much more than a stereotype. But
characters you build on, you pull away from that. It’s the individual traits
that make them stand out.
-
MW: If you only write an antagonist that’s just
opposed to the protagonist, then that’s a stereotype. But if you ask why, even
in one sentence, you can make them more.
-
Sometimes stereotypes are good. Put in aviation
because her supervisor found out she had a motorcycle. “Because you’re a little
bit crazy.” But if you don’t use more than the stereotype, that’s when things
go wrong.
-
MW: His vampires want to “pass” among humans.
The concept of “passing” is a form of social engineering, inhabiting a
stereotype to make people stop thinking about you. Stereotypes are good when
you want people to stop thinking about who you are.
-
AJ: Whenever we deal with anything historical.
We have a bad habit of saying, “100 years ago, everyone believed, “[something
stupid]”. Not necessarily true. Not everyone agreed back then, either. So why
do we assume in the past that it was somehow easier?
-
JS: We like our categories. It’s what we do to
classify and categorize books.
-
DK: In Star Wars, assuming the whole planet is a
desert planet, an ice planet, a forest planet, etc.
We like to avoid stereotypes.
Like “strong female character” just means “realistic woman”. And often with our
first character, we base it on our selves. Why?
-
Because we know ourselves, know how to base
things on ourselves, know how to write ourselves without stereotype. So how can
we overcome this fear of stereotypes in our writing?
-
MG: Conversations. Talking about it. Openly,
non-judgmental. Getting to know people helps a lot.
-
AJ: Once you’ve decided someone’s an ethnicity
or gender, creating an actual life for them, putting aside those concerns and
writing them as a character first. Wants to put himself into that character
first, and then ask others in beta-reads for feedback later. The moment you
ask, What do women want, women like? you’re
already screwed. With writing, what we do is an act of empathy. Putting ourselves
in someone else’s skin. Your capacity to put yourself in that position is
always going to be mediated by a sense of strangeness.
-
DK: If your character is playing with or against
type, there’s likely a very good reason why they do it. Maybe it’s not shown (the
deep part of the iceberg), but as long as you know it.
-
FH: But you can use the stereotypes to show how
a character is non-stereotypical.
-
JS: That’s
a lot of big words for a southern lady.
-
FH: I
bought me a thesaurus last year!
Audience Question: What’s the Difference
Between Archetype vs. Stereotype?
AJ: Archetype is about character function. E.g. the threshold guardian.
But a stereotype is something based on a set of social expectations of a
particular type.
MG: Sometimes the stereotype can come out of an archetype.
MW: And stereotypes are at the expense of someone, penalize someone.
Archetypes explain someone.
JS: When they wrote Tomorrowland,
the script called for a white male as the protagonist. Disney has wisened up.
Cast a teenaged girl instead, and changed nothing about the story. It became Terminator
as done by Disney with a happy hopeful ending.
No matter what you do or what
you write, you’re going to offend someone. It’s going to happen. So how do you
deal when someone comes up and tells you you’re wrong because the stereotype is
wrong, or because it’s offensive? (e.g. when Weird Al wrote the song WordCrimes, he didn’t know "spastic" is considered a version of the R word in Britain)
FH: Just says, “I’m not white.” And that usually shocks people. Her
grandparents had to pass, and hid this from their children. She’s a stereotype,
and she’s not.
AJ: Next year has a book from Tor with a 17-year-old female person of colour protagonist in a South-African like country. Says, “This is a fantasy
world that looks a lot like Africa, but it’s not, and he’s the only one
qualified to write this character, but he’s not.” Writing is an exercise in
empathy. He’s doing his best to do his research, ask the right questions, and
all he can do is give it his best shot, and see what happens. It’s scary.
MW: Plans to have half the cast male, half female when writing a book,
then varies it racially and religiously, and don’t worry, next time it’ll be
someone else’s turn. But when he receives criticism, he says, “So turn this
into a teachable moment. Tell me what I got wrong so I can do it better next
time.”
JS: Say “I’m sorry. What can I do to make it right?”
AJ: I’d like to have it before the book comes out...
AJ: Most of us have been in situations where we were out of place, not
what people expected. Knows some of the strangenesses that arise from that. For
example, he comes from a lower class, and was judged because of that at
university.
JS: This panel could go on a
long time, because this is such a big topic.
Yes. Yes it is. But they still managed to cover some great points (and.crack a few jokes, too!)
