And she's obviously trying to respect the whole own voices thing, but that always seems to end up backgrounding the marginalised characters too much, and end up being about the Nice White Lady too much.
Caveat that I have not read the book, but if you write your Jewish protagonist to feel like the yardstick of the Nice White Lady and not any kind of marginalized character in her own right, I think that is badly represented. The point is not to bastardize intersectionality into oppression Olympics; the point is that Jewish whiteness when it exists is always conditional, and especially if Kowal's AU NASA at all resembles our historical one, the protagonist should not be structurally interchangeable with any other non-Jewish white female calculator-astronaut who could have carried the book.
[edit] To be clearer, I am fine with her having epiphanies about what is and isn't about her! That's an important part of being an adult person in a complex world! But I get really twitchy when Jews with white privilege are treated as "just like white non-Jews, but with different religious practices," because that's how we end up with people insisting that national and global levels of anti-Semitism can't be rising murderously, because everyone knows Jews aren't marginalized enough to be in danger. Also it just isn't true.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2020-01-30 05:52 pm (UTC)Caveat that I have not read the book, but if you write your Jewish protagonist to feel like the yardstick of the Nice White Lady and not any kind of marginalized character in her own right, I think that is badly represented. The point is not to bastardize intersectionality into oppression Olympics; the point is that Jewish whiteness when it exists is always conditional, and especially if Kowal's AU NASA at all resembles our historical one, the protagonist should not be structurally interchangeable with any other non-Jewish white female calculator-astronaut who could have carried the book.
[edit] To be clearer, I am fine with her having epiphanies about what is and isn't about her! That's an important part of being an adult person in a complex world! But I get really twitchy when Jews with white privilege are treated as "just like white non-Jews, but with different religious practices," because that's how we end up with people insisting that national and global levels of anti-Semitism can't be rising murderously, because everyone knows Jews aren't marginalized enough to be in danger. Also it just isn't true.