I sure hope
I didn't sound totally bitchy in my last message
I'm unfortunately a very impatient person so if a discussion drags on for several days, I'll either just disengage silently or get a bit snappy. It's not that you're annoying me or anything but I just start to feel like there's a lack of progress and that's a thing I hate
You're just all right! Do not doubt yourself! I know I can be pretty annoying to people because I usually descend into heavy semantics, but that's only because I am a linguist and I want to make sure I never fall into the wormhole of "we aren't actually disagreeing because we just use the different definitions and are literally talking parallel to each other!"
Most discussions I've had with people stem from being on the different floors of the same building. I feel like this discussion does the same at times. You are talking more on the ethical side (as I see it. Maybe I am wrong there, too) -- whereas I am geeking hard over how words work. I am more into "hacker" things, so to speak. I don't care about how actual humans feel
. I want to dig in humans' brains and see how their wires work, not ask them what they feel about it -- you know?
So you are fine ^^. And thanks for an amazing discussion, by the way!
Sorry it took me so long to answer but I was actually mulling it over in how I wanted to represent my point of view most coherently, and thus, it took a lot of time.
(Also, I was a very bad girl, writing so much on the forum lately. My backlog slipped all the way and I had to fix it stat! Writing >6k words a day to do it was quite...
:)
Anyway, here is my reply thesis
The Definition of "male" in Fiction
male: person/character who identifies as male
Thank you for your answer. I think it's very elegant and can be used in ethical questions about gender and representation.
But the reason why I didn't accept it before is because it's cyclical. I.e. it loops back on itself and fails to define anything outside of ethical relation to such definitions.
It's like saying that "
blanket = is a kind of a blanket". It needs to point to something outside itself in order to be a
proper definition. Because now that the definition is "
anyone who identifies as male" it also needs to define what
it is that the person identifies "
as".
Even if we go for the easier route of defining "
male" -- which would be defining it as "
anyone that's not female", that puts us back into the self-looping definitions where now "
female" has to be defined.
If you said it was a "
feels male", I might have accepted it easier on a technicality. Because a feeling does not necessitate definition and can be extremely vague. Like, even without knowing language or understanding other people's emotions (if I were a baby) -- if I feel "
sad" or "
bored", that's just how I feel. It is 100% internal and does not require external comparison.
Feeling something is a priori and an inborn phenomenon.
On the contrary, if I "
identify my emotion as "bored" or "sad"" -- for that, I need external knowledge to be able to identify it as such. Even just labeling it by the name requires external interaction with the world outside of myself. I need to confirm that the label for this vague feeling exists and that, by trial-and-error, I can identify it according to the feeling I have.
To identify the emotions of "bored" and "sad" I need to do something more than just point at a noun synonym. A noun synonym would also necessitate a definition at some point, because nouns of such abstract concepts always need further elaborations.
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For example -- the most common definition of "male" is "a human man".
It is also insufficient because now we have to define what "
a human man" is so that its definition does not cycle back to "
male". After a certain number of iterations in searching among the noun synonyms, we would arrive at how most definitions actually work:
Grouping by
sets of characteristics and attributes and the meaning it bears outside of itself.
Which was my definition from the start. Your definition works, but it's one of the many definitions that are grouped around "sets of characteristics". Actually, your definition is pointing at exactly such a characteristic in the list of many.
I understand how my definition is unfulfilling because "
everything is defined by its sets of characteristics and attributes"! But that's how it is. The set for "male" can be represented in several distinct groupings, and ones that I really did not want to go into before. Because it acknowledges how vague and contradictory the definitions of "male" can get depending on cultures and zeitgeists. But in short:
There are sets of characteristics of male in political definitions, ideological, ethical, religious, social, economic, biological, neurological, chemical, cultural, linguistic, etc.
There are just too many for us to tackle atm. And it was why I said that I don't want to go into all of them -- but my point was literally that both the political and religious definitions of "male" might cause discomfort to certain groups of this forum and I am already scared a bit that we discuss something like this in the open when so many people might jump our throats at any moment?
(I am probably just overly negative about it, and nothing like that would happen because I think SH is one of the more accepting and friendly societies to discuss these kinds of issues in).
Anyway, defining "male" from the real world examples is fraught because we would have to agree which specific definitions from all the many ones we would use and WHY that one and not the others. Because like I said -- some of them contradict the others, and we don't need to go into such discussions here.
Thus, the definition of male I used for the entirety of sharing my thoughts -- is this one:
"
A fictional male is defined by a linguistic code based on certain sets of characteristics and attributes".
Since we had to choose one and not the others -- I chose this one because it's literally the only one that makes sense to me since we are discussing
fictional males. Not the
real ones.
And here is where your position and mine has another branching out, as I feel it.
The Self of a Simulacra
Your definition has this line in it: "
identifies as", and I have a big confusion about that... Sorry TT____TT.
Identifying requires the internal act in order to work. Most definitions of "identify" especially in conjunction with "as" quotes "oneself" (or "yourself") as the actor in the identifying process.
Like, Google:
assign (a particular characteristic or categorization) to oneself
regard oneself as sharing the same characteristics or thinking
McMillan dictionary:
to describe
yourself as
belonging to that
group or
category
Dictionary.com:
to associate oneself in feeling, interest, action, etc., with a specified group or belief system
Cambridge:
to
feel and say that you belong to a
particular group
Merriam-Webster doesn't even give a definition under "identify" because the verb as it is cannot be used on
oneself without specifying it is.
Now the question -- can fictional characters identify as anything, really?
(Your definition does not use the "is identified" because that is just... recognizing patterns and thus, would still go back to my definition which provides the
patterns. Thus, I assume it is referring to "identifies oneself as" or "identifies as" not
identifies in general, by some other people who are
not the said character).
You might say that some characters can -- but that would be a misconception. Characters do not possess feelings or thoughts. The author says they do. Thus, the person who does the "identifying" usually -- is either the author (who claims the character identifies as something) or the reader (who claims the same).
Even if the character just comes out and says "I identify myself as" in their story -- there will be no proof of them
identifying themselves as anything because their words are ALWAYS a translation by the means of author who chooses to tell their story. It would be like me, saying for my friend that they "identify as male" when my friend has no ability to either confirm or deny my conjecture.
I am the actor in this identification and since I have no real insight into my friend's thoughts or emotions -- all I can say is I "claim" they identify as such, but I cannot prove it.
Thus -- fictional characters cannot identify as anything. The author can say they do, but the author =/= the character themselves even if the author is a literal god who knows all thoughts of the said character. It is still going to be a translation between the "perceived person"(character) and the "actual person" (author).
I will give you this:
if the character has claimed in some novel that they identify as male, (even if the author was the one who put these words on the page) -- I would accept that as "this character identifies as male". Because we have no other basis to ever interact with a character, and the author's words are law.
But then we have this issue:
90% of all fictional characters in the world, either male or female -- have NEVER identified themselves as "male" or "female" on the pages on their stories. I actually believe this percentage is much higher than 90, but I will apply Good Faith here.
If you claim that they did, then you are implying that the fictional characters can identify as something outside of what is written in their linguistic code (outside of which they cannot even exist in the minds of more than one person, the author). And we have already seen that identifying requires internalization, and the fictional characters do not posses that outside of being "told they do" by the author. I.e. through second-hand information source.
Which does not count as "identification" because identification requires a "self" to do it with.
Thus, I feel like 90% of all BL would not be BL according to the definition you gave because the majority of "male characters" never engage with identification process to begin with.
If the definition of a genre fails to consider 90% of all books in this genre, it cannot be used as the definition of this genre.
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Then again, I feel that the majority of people who would say that a certain character "identifies" as something -- or even "feels as something", are not coming from the actual definition of "identify".
For example, I can say that Wei Wuxian clearly identifies as male even though that's never said on the pages of his BL book. Why can I say that?
It because of my experience based on reality. Wei Wuxian in this case stops being a linguistic code and takes the role of a real, existing man in my mind and I can assume that he can feel things and identify things within himself. Because I have experienced the real men around me behave in much the same manner as he does and thus, I correlate that experience from the real world onto the fictional one.
But the problem here is that it's a shortcut. And a very biased one and is used in all of fiction to fastforward through tedious descriptions of all the trivia about characters and rely on a lot of OMITTED information. Linguistic philosophers spent the last 30-50 years studying exactly that. How these shortcuts form and why they are so intrinsically biased.
The majority of these shortcuts can only work through assumption. I think it's very similar to
Reification fallacy and is one of the most curious acts the human mind tends to make.
Thus, talking about fictional males as though they were real would, to me, do a disservice both toward the fictional characters and toward the real people. Because if we equate them, it means we can put the "=" sign between the real person's feelings and actual self and the fictional person's
simulation of those, heavily based in bias and assumptions from the
outsider's point of view (author/reader).
I usually want to separate these two because giving someone third (author/reader) the full control over the feelings and thoughts of a person perceived as "real" is, frankly, a bit horrifying when we apply this logic to actual people in the real world.
It would mean that "a stranger assumes something about me = is as valid as my own personal identification".
Nooooo...
Omission and Assumption
By their very nature, fictional characters require a lot of omitted information in order to work. The majority of all characters, places, descriptions that exist in fiction are glimpses and flickers of information.
Gestalt theory and different laws of Pragnanz seem to correlate with how a lot of fiction works...
We never see the actual full description of characters, but only parts of them -- from which we form wholes based on our experience in the real world. The problem arises when I show you, a mature, educated person -- a picture of Mona Lisa with 80% of its surface removed and you are still able to recognize it. Because you've seen the original. (And I don't mean here actual "you" -- just a figure of speech).
But if I show it to a person who hasn't seen the Mona Lisa, they might not be able to predict or even understand what the picture was supposed to represent. Therefore,
you are the one who is wrong in seeing the "80% missing Mona Lisa as still Mona Lisa" -- not
them.
They are seeing reality, you are assuming, guided by previous experience.
Our experience is the primary tool of our assumptions in fiction (and reality as well, but that's a different thing). But out experience is also the cause of a lot of bias and prejudice. A lot of assumptions we make are not based on the actual information we are given but on the contamination of this information with out prior experiences.
Thus, most of the time, the information about the male characters your definition uses falls victim to this exact phenomenon. It is omitted, but you assume it is there. When, in reality, it almost never is... (?)
The actual Linguistic code of "male" in Fiction
When I talk about the "fictional males", I want to discard the majority of political, religious, ethical, and societal definitions of "male" in the real world, but I can't.
The reason I
can imagine Wei Wuxian as a male is precisely because I have seen countless examples of males in the real world and can equate between these two. So, to some degree, the definition of a fictional male would have to rely on the real world definitions of "male" -- but again, we have many of those.
Thus, I will try to use
most of them (prioritizing the linguistic ones, of course) in equal measure regardless of culture/politics/ideology/society, etc. It's not about which ones are correct or most widely-accepted but about those that CAN work for defining a "male character". Based on the ones that we find most common in fictional "males", here are the lines of the linguistic code, showing the specific attributes and characteristics most commonly associated with "males" and that, by running the code, can draw the "image of a male" in the reader's imagination based on their prior experiences in the real world:
- Traditionally-male Naming Convention (John, Fyodor, Chandra, Guatemoc)
- Male Pronouns (he, his, himself)
- Traditionally-male Nouns (father, brother, lord, king)
- Male-associated Clothing and Accessories (polo-shirt+khaki pants, cod pieces, kilt)
- Traditionally male-attributed situation (all-male barracks, all-male submarine crew)
- Traditionally male-perceived occupation (surgeon, judge, policeman, cowboy)
- Traditionally male-attributed looks (short hair, shaved, pronounced musculature, beards)
- Self-identifies as male
- Conventionally male-attributed behavior
- Conventionally male-attributed emotions
- Conventionally male-attributed thought patterns
- Conventionally male-attributed chemistry
- Conventionally male-attributed biology
- Conventionally male-attributed neurology
- Conventionally male-attributed social status (known among peers as...)
- Conventionally male-attributed education
- Conventionally male-attributed background
- Conventionally male-attributed meta-role in the story (the pursuer, the aggressor, the instigator)
Please tell me some if you think of any! I think I tried to cover anything that may come up in a book but I am unsure if there are any I forgot.
What I want to draw your attention to is the fact that the majority of these can be easily omitted (the value set to UNKNOWN) or denied (value set to 0) and the code will still continue to run fine, projecting the image of a "male character" into the minds of the readers. I know it from practice because such scientific issues have already been explored and noted.
Boston University is a leading private research institution with two primary campuses in the heart of Boston and programs around the world.
www.bu.edu
And some other articles that are... a bit more incendiary in their delivery so I don't want to quote them here.
Just Google "gender bias in writing fiction/characters" and you will find some. In other words, when people interact with linguistic code, they jump to assumptions and conclusions VERY fast and the majority of information I listed above isn't needed to project an image of a "male" or a "female".
Or in short -- stereotypes reign, alas.
PART 1 of 3
cliffhanger music
(because the forum made me split them! Sorry)
