metalpetal

Being cute was a mistake
Being likeable instead of insane:
A straight line to ruin.

—Black Dresses, earth worm


There's a decade-old post from Kontextmaschine, a fixture in Posting Valhalla*, that I think about a lot. It opens thus:
The term Something-For-Everyone Liberalism has been stuck in my head ever since. Uncharitably, you could call it "representation matters! :)" with an edgier coat of paint, and God knows that this is no substitute for serious materialist activism. But still, I think the term is gesturing at something real and worth fighting for.

Culture-war shitstirrers have used "DEI" as their all-purpose slur substitute for a reason: it's the most unsympathetic corporate-buzzword term for the concept of caring about other people. But I think that these folks can only imagine diversity as boring HR shit because they are absolutely not seeking out, let alone getting invited to, anything more interesting. There are a million things cooler than Pronouns 101, but nobody's gonna show you Porpentine when you haven't passed the "don't call people trannies" module.

But a lot of people who pass that test fail the next one. The casual, centrist bigot tends to think of demographics beyond their own as distant abstractions, rather than real people who can hear them. This can easily become a feedback loop where nobody from those groups wants to approach them, and so they never pick up on the subtler cues of cultures unlike their own, and their world stays small and homogenous and they keep complaining about Forced Diversity. But then a miracle happens, the loop breaks, and they realize that the [slur redacted]s ain't so bad after all. But they still haven't met very many of them, and so their support is for a largely imagined and unseen population.

I can tell when somebody is engaging with me as an avatar of a political battle rather than a human being. Whether I'm being treated as a cute endangered animal, the Virgin Mary, or a confessional priest, it fuckin' sucks and I generally say "please redirect this energy to brutalizing Ron DeSantis." I haven't encountered any in the wild yet, but the Protect the Dolls T-shirt is the perfect summation of this aesthetic. The slang-appropriation isn't great, but my main objection is that while I'd trust someone with this shirt not to hate-crime me, I would not trust them to take me intellectually seriously.

Okay, I have vented the piss and vinegar, time for a tonal beat switch.

One of my indulgent pleasures in The Current Era is reaction videos of people not especially tapped into queer art cultures being blown away by weird faggot music**. As they get acclimated, there's a delightful sense of queerphobia as not just offensive, but devastatingly uncool - they understand that you have to be able to fuck with queers to engage with a lot of the most interesting art being made today.

And good lord, there really is so much of it - every time I turn around, my friends are buzzing about another album or game or comic bubbling up from this scene. I love contributing and tending to it, and not just altruistically. After a day of being cluelessly misgendered or underestimated, it is vital that I can come home to an art culture with no interest in defending or explaining itself. Obtusely high-context, fearlessly transgressive, funny and angry and horny as hell.

But then, the catch. For all that I try to reject respectability politics, there's the deeper-rooted weed of exceptionalism politics. I may be proudly big and weird and clocky and championing queer art, but I still have the gnawing urge to be some artistically brilliant beacon for my community (and maybe some incidental outsiders). This is not unrelated to how I'm one of the oldest and longest-transitioning people in my regular social world, even though I'm not even 30.

If this tendency goes unchecked for too long, it can become a sort of photonegative respectability politics: "something for everyone" except myself, full of something to prove about our brilliance, devoid of any genuine connection to what I'm making. Even worse, it can slip into advertisements for being the cool, fun, edgy transsexuals you'd like to hang out with and thinking that outsiders' consumption is equal to love.

The best outcome of that arc is to become Florence***. Its iconic treasures were created as desperate defensive measures during the most hellish years of the Renaissance, shoring up both internal legitimacy and external prestige. It has been successful to a fault: the city has had a feedback loop of winning the self-promotion game, becoming a gravity well of preservation and scholarship and investment drawn away from the less-glamorous cities with just as much to teach. It was even treated astonishingly gently by all sides in World War II.

During the war, Mussolini made a point of showing off the Uffizi to Hitler.****

Well, sure, we can't control our legacies, and baby-proofing everything against bad-faith analysis makes for vastly worse art. And there are certainly worse fates than ending up like a UNESCO World Heritage Site. I've seen it with my husband, and I shared in his longstanding love of the city. But to be held in reverent incuriosity, failures and biases frozen in amber, is not the future I want for my culture.

And the outcomes can get much worse from there. Making acclaimed art is no guarantee of prosperity or safety for you or your community.*****

I don't have good answers for how to handle this on any structural level. All I know is that trying to morally shepherd the world sets my brain on fire, and I was greatly touched by the central theme of Lent, a superb historical fantasy set in Renaissance Florence: set down your Messiah complex and just reach out to your fellow damned.

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*The Lore: Kontextmaschine was a guy who had some fascinating Takes as well as some generally repugnant might-makes-right politics. He claimed that getting COVID made him much more outgoing and also bisexual, then he described symptoms consistent with a brain tumor, then he didn't pursue any treatment for that and kept taking creatine until he died.

**Figure 1.

***This prolonged metaphor is based on Ada Palmer's book Inventing the Renaissance and various posts from her blog.

****In preparation for the visit, he also gave the city its unintentionally-funniest monument: big bay windows cut into the otherwise-assassin-proof Vasari Corridor, right above the very busy Ponte Vecchio.

*****Specific examples are left as an exercise for the reader.