Cannibalism

Lateral violence is when people within a marginal community take out their rage on each other. If you’ve witnessed an activist circle meltdown, you’ve probably seen it. The egos, the pain, the venom, the hurt. It boils down to a radioactive sludge that poisons everything it touches, until once vibrant communities become digital ghost towns, low-rez tumbleweeds blowing through ancient and abandoned threads.

(My blender has a metaphor mixing setting, and damn if I don’t enjoy it.)

At the beginning of 2014, there was a real sense of hope in the online feminist communities that I hang out in that we’d make real progress in confronting lateral violence. That didn’t happen, or if it did, it only seemed to be the results of an effort to circle the wagons against the screaming hate machine that erupted later that year. The root of the problem wasn’t pulled up; if anything, we’ve only become more insidious with each other.

But let’s get specific. What do I mean by lateral violence within marginalized communities? I mean points-scoring. I mean witch hunts. I mean the way the word “problematic” has been weaponized into a scarlet letter. I mean the way our social justice discourse has necrotized into a filthy ethos that encourages us to point the finger early, point the finger first, lest the finger be pointed at us.

I mean the way it’s strangling us.

Over and over we demand more representation, more marginalized creators, more voices from the edges. And these are good demands. We need more movies by women, and people of color, and queer folk. We need more books by women of color and trans folks. We need music by gay dudes and paintings by lesbians. We need more art from the edges, so that the kids at the edges growing up today will know they’re not alone. To see themselves embodied in all aspects of life, to help them find the strength to thrive in a world that too often wishes they weren’t around.

I cannot overemphasize how important this is to me. I wrote Dreadnought specifically so a scared trans girl could stumble across it on a library bookshelf and have something that, at least for a few hours, would help her feel powerful and important and worthwhile. To help her imagine a world in which she’d decide to stick around long enough to see what her twenties would be like. The money is secondary for me, as it is for many marginalized artists. We do this because we can’t not do it. Because we know what it was like to grow up with only a few scraps of culture that even acknowledged we existed, and because we want to ease that pain for the kids who come after us.

That’s why it breaks my heart that I can’t think of a single marginalized artist, writer, or creator that I am familiar with on a personal level who hasn’t expressed fear that someday they’re going to put a foot wrong and then—

–and then the mob will come for them.

We’re not talking about Gators when we have these hushed conversations. We talk about Gators and their ilk loudly, and in public. The conversations I’m talking about are hushed, as often as not. DMs, face-to-face, Gchat. Sometimes Twitter. Sometimes blogs with all the names stripped off. But very, very frequently with one eye over our shoulder, we speak about how our allies and compatriots sometimes scare us to death. Sometimes it feels like any friend can become an accuser. Any finger can be pointed right at our hearts, right through our chests, right down to our soul to damn us eternally in the eyes of our community. You know what I mean. You know what I’m talking about. You’ve seen it happen before. I say lateral violence because it’s precise, but what I really mean are social hit jobs, and they are especially devastating to members of marginalized communities who, once ejected from their support network, may have nowhere else to go.

Not only are the consequences more severe for marginalized people, but the chances of this happening seem to be higher, as well. The moment you stake your claim out as a queer writer (or a writer of color or a feminist writer or any other marginalized voice) you are stating your intention to become part of a tradition. It’s a proud tradition, and a vital one. It’s a statement that yes, there will be politics in your work, and you won’t shrink from that. It doesn’t demand that you write nothing but polemics or didactic just-so parables, but it does demand an awareness of who you are and where you’re writing from, and to my mind it can create some of the most beautiful art we have available to us.

But the blade has two sides. Because now, as a queer writer, you’re also expected to be better—for some value of better­ that varies from reader to reader, community to community, sometimes self-contradictory and always in flux—than those other writers, those plain old writer-writers. It’s okay for a writer-writer to fuck up, or if it’s not okay, there are allowances to be made. Sure Popular CisHet White Dude Author X makes all his female fans cringe when he writes chapters from a woman’s point of view, but hey, his plots are zippy and the dialog is fun, so we’ll ignore that. But should a self-identifying lesbian writer screw up a chapter from a gay man’s point of view, she cannot expect the same mercy. She should have known better. And the more marginalized groups a writer belongs to, the higher the standards she’s held to. We love to eat our own.

So not only are the consequences of lateral violence—both emotional and professional—more devastating, the very same forces that make marginalized writers and artists marginal in the first place make this lateral violence far, far more commonplace for us.

I do not know of a single writer who I know in a personal context who hasn’t expressed, at least privately, some doubt and fear that someday they will say something careless and be ruined for it. Or that something they write will be taken out of context, and they’ll be called to be “accountable” for it, whatever the hell accountability is supposed to mean in this context. Or even, yes, that someone who is an oversensitive ninny could decide to take out their insecurities on them. It’s happened. Don’t think it hasn’t. And the more marginal you are, the greater this fear tends to be. I know that it’s my biggest fear as a writer.

I’m not worried about never getting a fat contract. I don’t spend a lot of time twisting my apron over the fear that I’ll never leave a WorldCon with a rocket in my luggage. Sure I think about these things, but they don’t scare me. What scares me is the thought that one of my human flaws will be excavated from the deep sedimentary layers of the Internet, ripped from context and history, and spun out into a reputation-destroying dagger planted right in my back by someone I thought valued me as a member of their community. I think we can all think of an instance where we saw something like this happened. And if you can’t—well, have I got some bad fucking news for you!

This kind of thing is horrible enough when it isolates people from their social groups. People have been traumatized, ruined over this kind of thing. But when it destroys writers and artists personally and professionally, it contributes to the impoverishment of our culture. It pays the bullshit forward to the next generation by strangling our clearest marginalized voices before they can do their best work. It contributes to that blasted cultural wasteland that so many of us struggled to survive in when we were younger and still looking for our people.

For a long time, I resisted using the word violence to describe actions that don’t involve inflicting physical harm on people. In some ways, I still wish we had a better term for this, one that distinguished this kind of harm from bloodshed. But the anxiety I feel over this—that all my writer friends who aren’t straight, cisgender white dudes feel over this—doesn’t seem like it would come from something as innocuous as a few dirty words, a few unpleasant conversations. This is a poison right at the heart of our communities, and it makes me sick to think how many voices—perceptive, beautiful, lively voices—we’ve lost before we even got to hear them simply because some people decided it wasn’t worth the risk of seeing if anyone wanted to hear what they had to say.

I don’t yet know how we fix this.

But we need to admit that it’s a problem.