In October 2017, I had a story published in Tripping the Tale Fantastic: Weird Fiction by Deaf and Hard of Hearing Writers. As the title suggests, only authors who were deaf or hard of hearing were eligible to submit to the anthology. I was pleased to have my story accepted there, but I found the situation peculiar, because I’ve never thought of myself as a ‘hard of hearing writer’ or a ‘member of the deaf community’. In fact, as a 40-year-old white male with some conservative leanings, I’m usually viewed as a member of the patriarchy that has suppressed generations of minorities.
Fiction itself has always been political, but the past couple of years have seen a sudden proliferation in submission guidelines that ask for diverse voices, writers of colour, LGBTQI authors, female and feminist authors, disabled authors, NESB authors – basically any minority the editor(s) can dream up. This literary virtue signalling is ludicrous for a number for reasons:
1. Authorship has always allowed anonymity, and history is awash with women and ethnic minorities who enjoyed successful writing careers.
2. No editor of my acquaintance has ever turned down a well-written story because the author was non-white or his surname had too many consonants in it.
3. A physically disabled author’s writing, for example, does not possess qualities that would see it excluded from a ‘regular’ anthology.
4. These days, writers and editors – at least in the small press world – rarely meet face to face, so an author could claim to be gay/indigenous/whatever and the editor would have no way to verify it. By the same token, a prejudiced editor would have no way to be sure about the age, colour or creed of the person behind the byline.
There is some merit to the argument that a story featuring gay or transgender characters is hard to sell to a mainstream magazine (and there is a sizeable niche market for ‘queer’ fiction as a result). But on the whole this trend is just ‘positive discrimination’, designed to give the publisher a warm feeling about his progressive ideals.
The corollary is ‘cultural appropriation’, a repellent concept if ever there was one. The whole point of writing fiction is to imagine oneself in another person’s shoes. How grey and predictable the literary world would be if such a notion had taken hold of previous generations. No Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Huckleberry Finn, no They’re a Weird Mob or Gone Fishin’, no Gerald’s Game or Dolores Claiborne.
The dismal terminus of politically-driven publishing is wilful ignorance masquerading as enlightenment, the kind on show in ‘20 authors I don’t have to read because I’ve dated men for 16 years’ by Helena Fitzgerald. Everything wrong with third-wave feminism, the social media age and literary virtue signalling is encapsulated in this one convenient article.