We need to talk about representation. (Misshelved #10)
I am a bookseller, but I often joke that I do not know how to read—and in this era of burnout and pandemic and an overwhelming amount of media, I certainly don’t read as much as I used to. I am queer, and I use more specific gender and sexuality labels interchangably, depending on my mood. That alone is enough to banish me from queerdom, according to some on the internet. I am disabled, but not visibly so, which means I am not disabled enough for some people. I am a New Yorker who doesn’t like New York City. I am a theater fan who unironically likes Cats.
I am bad representation for all my communities.
Last year, I recommended Lulu Miller’s book, Why Fish Don’t Exist, to a customer. I talked enthusiastically about how the dual narratives—a biography of taxonomist David Starr Jordan juxtaposed against Miller’s own recollections of dealing with depression and a newly realized queerness—paralleled each other and explored how complicated people can be, why they are cruel to one another, and how they fail. The customer read it and enjoyed it, but they were confused about why I loved it so much. Miller, they said, isn’t a good person. I didn’t like her. She’s not good representation. She’s done bad things.
I nodded, but I wanted to ask: She’s not good representation of what? Mental illness? Queer identity? The complex nuances of being a real person? How should you represent something that you simply are? Is every person supposed to fully embody and represent all the complicated nuances of an entire group of people?
She’s not a good person. I didn’t like her.
These days, I think a lot about the people I’ve seen pushed out of marginalized communities. I remember the author who felt forced to leave the YA community and stop publishing because her novel was considered a “bad” representation of bisexuality, and she didn’t feel she could defend it, even though the entire book was based on her own experiences. There's a poster of a book cover on the wall above my computer, and I look at it and try not to reflect on how that author was attacked for writing “bad” relationship representation, and the attacks only stopped because she outed herself, in detail, as someone who has experienced sexual violence.
As I researched this essay, a bookseller friend texted me. They were fretting about whether they could or should recommend an upcoming novel by a BIPOC author on TikTok, because the author once made a comment about their novel that was perceived to be racist by American standards—but the author wasn’t American, had never lived in America, and had written their book based on a different set of cultural standards.
She’s not good representation.
Miller bares part of her soul in Why Fish Don’t Exist, exposing the most delicate and unflattering parts of herself on the page: her bad thoughts, her infidelity, her depression, her fascination with a man who turns out to be absolutely horrid. She is a real person sharing her real life, and in doing so, she helps us examine our own truths. Why do we keep trying again and again in a world that tells us to stop? How can we support the people we harm, or the people harmed by those we care about? If we know we’ve made mistakes, can we become better?
She’s done bad things.
And I think: Haven’t we all?
☠︎
The way we talk about representation doesn’t work anymore.
On a great day, it is simplistic. At its worst, it is actively harmful to the lived experiences of every member of every marginalized community.
These days, we talk about representation as a binary: It's either good or it's bad. If we’re feeling fancy, we might say that representation is positive or negative.
We discuss all subjects of representation this way, whether we’re talking about queer and BIPOC representation and physical and mental disability representation or more specific and “niche” representations, such as “person from New York” or “person who played Dungeons & Dragons in the ’80s.” Representation is discussed this way by average readers and authors and editors and literary agents and booksellers.
If we're honest with ourselves, we know that nothing fits neatly into one of two boxes. Stories especially aren’t easy to categorize, trying as they might to capture complicated experiences or create new worlds within the limitations of our current one.
And yet. Here we are.
Framing representation as simply as good or bad, with no room for anything in the middle, creates an unintentionally complicated moral dichotomy. It flattens marginalized characters, taking them out of the context of their roles in the unfolding story and transforming them into icons meant to represent entire real, diverse communities.
But in this current moment, having good representation is the goal. What that means depends on the day. Is it okay to write about a sad lesbian today, or is that leaning into a stereotype? Is it valid to explore stories of racism experienced in Black and Asian and Latinx communities, or is that just perpetuating the idea that all BIPOC stories are “issue” books? If individual characters must represent their whole community, can they make a mistake as part of their character arc without being construed as problematic?
More often than not, it's an ordinary reader who decides whether something is good representation. It's me. It's you. It's whoever is engaging with the text in that moment—and, in the case of the internet, it's often the first person to engage with the text. It’s a reader with a galley, reading months before the book will be published, or a reader reading during the early weeks after the book has been published. We use our feelings about whether the representation works for us—or whether it is us, or our friends, or the marginalized group with whom we are allied—to determine whether the representation is good or bad. If we are not reading the book, we use the feelings of the reader who did.
But personally disliking representation doesn't actually make it bad. It just makes it not for you.
What happens when the quality of representation is determined by an individual reader’s feelings, then discussed as having passed or failed within the strictest black-and-white moral framework? What happens when two people disagree about representation?
The person who thought it was bad is declared right, because they have the moral upper hand.
Not every book is for every reader, but every reader must agree on questions of representation. If good is the goal and even one reader thinks a book has failed, then the book has failed. When it comes to harm, representation is a zero-sum game.
It’s an impossible game to win.
☠︎
I’ll be honest: I don’t really want to share this essay.
As I rewrite and research and rewrite and format and edit and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite, I feel an ever-looming sense of dread. How we, the book community, talk about representation is something that nobody wants to discuss. Maybe it’s because the platforms where most conversations about representation take place limit discussions to two-minute videos and 240-character snippets, and this conversation is so much bigger and so much more complicated than that. Maybe it’s because people are afraid of hurting members of marginalized communities, whether their own or those they care about. Maybe it’s because people are afraid of being hurt.
I am afraid of hurting people. I am afraid of being hurt. I am, after all, human.
I am a human who wants her community to be better.
Community activism requires meeting people where they are and believing, in your heart, that they want to be better and do better. It doesn’t mean giving up on people who have made mistakes in the past or people who will make mistakes in the future. It doesn’t mean boiling characters and stories down to a simple binary framework under the guise of doing good work.
Consumption is not activism. Reading is not activism.
Yet we talk about the act of judging the quality of representation like it is. We talk about reading as if enjoying bad representation makes you a bad person, and as if reading books with good representation makes you a good person. In an essay for The Guardian published in the spring of 2021, Homegoing author Yaa Gyasi reflected on what it was like to see her 2016 novel scale the bestseller charts again in the summer of 2020, in the wake of the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor. In the essay, titled "White people, black authors are not your medicine," Gyasi wrote:
“So many of the writers of colour that I know have had white people treat their work as though it were a kind of medicine [...] and if they’re being totally honest, they don’t actually even take the medicine half the time. They just buy it and leave it on the shelf. What pleasure, what deepening, could there be in ‘reading’ like that? To enter the world of fiction with such a tainted mission is to doom the novel or short story to fail you on its most essential levels.”
Or, put more bluntly by Elaine Castillo in an essay for Lit Hub: “All the ‘representation matters’ rhetoric in the world means nothing if we do not address the fundamentally fucked-up relationship between writers of color and white audiences that persists in our contemporary reading culture.”
When we enter a novel with the expectation that its representation must be good or bad, we are inclined to find the worst in it, because characters are not flat educational tools. They represent complex aspects of human identity and, given the imperfect nature of humanity, cannot be perfect. Such expectations doom a novel to fail: We are engaging with a novel on cartoonish moralistic terms rather than meeting a book where it is and with the ideas it is choosing to engage.
In short, we’re reading books in bad faith.
Bad-faith readings come when a reader pretends to want to see the concepts a story is engaging with while intentionally looking for anything that could be a flaw. This practice is part of a larger problem of cultural bad faith that author S. Jae-Jones recently characterized as “a form of willful, malicious misunderstanding when it comes to any sort of orthodoxy that has the potential to contradict, undermine, or simply contrast with my personal morals and ethics."
There are a lot of reasons why we read like this, why we talk about representation as a moral judgment based on individual, emotion-driven reactions. Part of it has to do with the rise of a digital purity culture and the lack of a counterculture in both publishing and the greater media landscape. Part of it has to do with how social media platforms like Twitter, TikTok, Tumblr and Instagram limit our ability to engage with nuance and reward us for righteous, misplaced anger—especially when it’s directed at somebody we know to be real. Part of it is how novels have been transformed from literary works of art into accessible “content” owed to readers by authors with whom they often form parasocial relationships. (As author Kacen Callender described, “Within the community, many readers expect writers to bend to their will, and to write what it is the reader wants to see, because they feel entitled to the work of an author.”) Part of it is the way that publishers themselves misunderstand long-established age categories for books, releasing, say, middle grade novels with 15-year-old protagonists or YA novels in which the characters are effectively adults, and then those age categories themselves are conflated on social media, such that middle grade, young adult and adult books are equally and universally expected to function as moral parables, particularly when they are written by BIPOC women. Part of it is the deep desire for representation that reflects readers' own experiences in an industry that still does not publish enough books by marginalized creators and about marginalized protagonists—though, thankfully, there seem to be more every year. And part of it is how that deep desire allows publishers to use good representation as part of a marketing plan, an identity-as-business-plan mentality that prioritizes books as a product over books as art.
Beneath all of this is a power rush: Declaring representation to be bad provides readers with a self-granted permission to engage in morally motivated network harassment. Morally motivated networked harassment is a new sociological theory that both describes and seeks to explain the social media dogpiling that unfolds when someone’s personal moral outrage is matched on a community scale. As communications studies scholar Alice Marwick explains, “It makes people feel good, strengthens their own sense of morality, and makes them feel like part of a like-minded group of people.”
It’s interesting to me how accusations of bad representation are produced every few months like clockwork, particularly in the YA and YA-adjacent social media communities. A queer author with a book coming out will be accused of racism or transphobia or a different kind of homophobia by a single, anonymous source because of a single line taken out of context. The author will then be attacked for weeks by people who haven’t read the book but don’t want to look like a bad ally. A BIPOC author with a book coming out will be accused of homophobia or transphobia or a different kind of racism due to a world building framework that didn’t work for one reader personally. The author will then be attacked for weeks by people who didn’t read the book. Human brains are rewarded by the dopamine spike associated with the righteous indignation—thanks, morally motivated network harassment!— while the marginalized author takes hits to their career and their mental health. Hell, there’s a story of somebody thinking Giovanni's Room is homophobic because they were told so on the internet. This cycle ticks on and on, with no grace allowed for human error or different opinions. Our insistence on centering how readers feel about representation allows for malicious, bad-faith readings of books, while the nature of the internet—and Twitter particularly—allows those interpretations to be perceived as fact.
Sometimes, what is in a book is conflated with what an author believes and advocates for in their real life. A single line spoken or thought by a villain is seen to represent the true agenda of the author, especially when taken out of context. A mistake a character makes is construed as behavior the author actually endorses. Yet more often than not, what’s happening is the opposite of these interpretations: Fiction gives creators a chance to explore the things they don’t believe to try to better understand them. As Lin-Manuel Miranda told GQ, “I find that, for me, the work is a safe place to put all the stuff you don't want to put in your real life. I don't want to be a crazy, manic asshole. I don't want to have an affair. I don't want to have a fucking gunfight. But! There's a part of your brain that wants to experience everything, and so work's a safe place to explore it all. Both in the writing and in the performing. I get to write about an affair. I get to have the guilt and the feeling of that without having to fuck my life up. [laughs] Art is the place to safely explore all those other sides of you, because the side you want to bring home is the side that wants to be a good father and be a good husband and be a good son. In art we can be fucking nuts.”
Here’s the truth of it, though: Whether a book is an exploration of the author’s own life or an imagining of a life that the author would never lead, most of the time, books aren’t bad. They’re simply … fine. The experiences they represent work for some readers and do not work for others. A book that some readers find heinous might also be a book in which another reader sees themselves for the first time, maybe even in a way that saves them. But the framework we use to talk about representation now leaves no room for representation to simply be. Books have to be categorized by the presence of good or bad representation so that we can justify our choices to read and enjoy them.
It’s exhausting.
At the end of the day, declaring that a book about a suicidal lesbian is inherently problematic because you feel it feeds into a trope about depressed lesbians minimizes the actual experiences of other sapphic readers—and, perhaps, even the author themselves. To say that “issue” books about BIPOC characters only contain racist and outdated caricatures when they may reflect the reality of some readers isn’t helpful, and neither is dismissing joyful, escapist stories about BIPOC characters because they “aren’t realistic.” (And yes, stories can both explore issues and be joyful.) Forcing authors to out themselves or over-explain their identities in order to justify a trope or story that a reader may not fully vibe with doesn’t move representation forward. It stagnates creativity. Whether an author writes inside their culture or outside their own experiences, what is considered good representation varies drastically from person to person. Even what is considered cultural appropriation varies from person to person. Not all representation is expressed through romance, and conflict doesn’t equal poor representation. It’s what moves the book forward.
The declarations of readers who decide, based solely on feeling or "vibes," that books contain bad representation, should be seen as inadequate, particularly when those readers' "vibes" are at odds with what a book is actually doing. You can’t read something with malicious intent and then say that you’re making an objectively correct judgment about it.
☠︎
I know how some readers will react to this essay. I don’t understand nuance, they’ll say. I don’t understand representation. I think bad representation doesn’t exist. I have an agenda. I am rolling in my white privilege. I am wrong.
I am bad representation for all my communities.
Don’t worry. I know.
☠︎
Not every book is for every reader. Not every representation works for every reader.
That’s just how books work.
The simplified framework of good or bad representation erases the truth: Books don’t exist in a vacuum. At the Children’s Institute children’s bookselling conference this past June, in a keynote about Native books and representation, author and Heartdrum co-founder Cynthia Leitich Smith spoke briefly about how a book could be “in conversation with” different ideas and aspects of culture. Her newest book, Sisters of the Neversea, reimagines Peter Pan and grapples with questions of representation from both J.M. Barrie’s classic novel and Disney’s film adaptation. In both, Tiger Lily was a flattened, mocking representation of Indigineous people, and Smith thought her classmates would view her differently after seeing the film. How could she adapt a story she loved despite its problematic elements? How could she take the parts she loved, reshape the parts she didn’t, and make her novel a conversation about how Native American girls are treated?
As she described her feelings after viewing Disney’s adaptation of Peter Pan as a child at a drive-in theater, Smith’s issue with Tiger Lily’s treatment wasn’t necessarily that it was negative or problematic, though it was both of those things. It was its reductive nature that bothered her: the flattening, the caricature, the way it reflected poorly on her. Sisters of the Neversea aims for a conversation with a negative text in a way that will work for some Native readers and won’t work for others. Hell, some Native readers might hate the very idea of reimagining of Peter Pan to begin with, viewing it as a validation or excusing of the original narrative.
If one Native reader hates Sisters of the Neversea, does that make it bad representation?
Of course not. It’s more complicated than that. As author Ursula K. LeGuin said in prepared remarks presented at the 2004 BookExpo America convention, “Immature people crave and demand moral certainty: This is bad, this is good. Kids and adolescents struggle to find a sure moral foothold in this bewildering world; they long to feel they’re on the winning side, or at least a member of the team. To them, heroic fantasy may offer a vision of moral clarity. Unfortunately, the pretended Battle Between (unquestioned) Good and (unexamined) Evil obscures instead of clarifying, serving as a mere excuse for violence—as brainless, useless, and base as aggressive war in the real world.”
But a binary good versus bad framework doesn’t allow us the language to discuss representation in a more complicated manner. Representation must be good or bad. It must embody all experiences within a culture or a community and all readers must love it, or else it fails.
So I would like to propose a new framework for how we talk about representation.
Throw away good and bad. Throw away positive and negative.
In the framework I’m proposing, representation can be one of three things: productive, reductive, or neutral.
Productive representation meaningfully engages with the depiction of a marginalized identity over the course of the text and shifts the conversation about that identity forward within the culture at large when compared to other books in the market and other stories being told. Commercial success is not required to move the conversation forward, though it is great when it happens. For example, the success of Colson Whitehead’s 2016 novel The Underground Railroad reflected the broader cultural conversation about the Black Lives Matter movement and how America treats Black people and was followed by Angie Thomas’s 2017 YA novel, The Hate U Give, which radically changed how YA publishers engaged with books about the Black Lives Matter movement and continued that broader cultural conversation about how American culture treats Black people, particularly Black teens.
Reductive representation relies on flattened depictions, stereotypes or caricatures or engages with representations of marginalized identities only as a punchline, especially within the context of the wider market and culture. Reductive representation allows for books that do harm to be called out and discussed while decentering an individual reader’s feelings in favor of a focus on how that representation affects a wider community. There are plenty of examples of books that have been called out for bad representation that we could label reductive. Beatrice Sparks’ Go Ask Alice, which represented drug users and drug addictions so terribly and so inaccurately that it helped inspire the war on drugs, is a prime example of reductive representation. Jeanine Cummins’ American Dirt, which was lambasted broadly by the Mexican American community for its representation of Mexican immigrant experiences, can also be described as a reductive representation.
Within this framework the declaration of productive or negative cannot be made by an individual reader: It must arise from communal reactions and discussion. Decentralizing individual readers in favor of collective conversations and, rarely, community consensus is a necessary dimension of this framework. In much the same way that individual books or characters cannot represent an entire community’s experience, individual readers cannot and should not speak on behalf of entire communities.
Neutral representation is representation that is neither particularly conversation-moving or market-moving angle nor a flattening caricature. Books categorized this way present fleshed-out characters living full lives, much like the people reading them, without necessarily focusing specifically on a singular issue in a way that changes the market. The concept that most representation can be neutral—neither good nor bad, positive nor negative, but simply an on-the-page character that may resonate with some readers and not with others—allows authors to engage in a conversation that’s far broader than the present moralized binary framework of representation. This mitigates the pressure put on books to represent every aspect of a community or to educate readers who don’t share the marginalization being represented. After all, there are very few books that will reshape the way all (or many) people view the world.
Almost every book falls into this category.
Even an author writing in conversation with other narratives isn't always seeking to create productive, groundbreaking representation. They might simply have a topic they wish to explore and characters they wish to represent without having to carry the entire weight of a community. Representation within such conversations is usually neither productive or reductive but rather a neutral part of a larger conversation. I would prefer that such books contain neutral, inclusive representations—working for some readers and not working for others, as with most things in life—than have historically marginalized characters be cut entirely, even if by authors writing outside their own experience.
As a listener recently wrote to the hosts of the Fansplaining podcast:
“I understand that writing outside your own experience is a risk. Yes, it is possible to go very wrong when imagining the problems of people unlike you, but I think that not imagining it, and not writing characters unlike you causes its own set of problems that can be worse. The strength of writing is that you can imagine a life outside of your own experience. And if you can help yourself understand the challenges of another person’s life, then you can convince others.”
The concepts of both neutral representation and of books being in conversation with one another also empowers authors to trust readers to engage with the material presented to them rather than forcing authors to overexplain the decisions of every bad character. Unless we’re talking about picture books, readers are not toddlers; authors expect them to be able to engage and think critically, and for readers to assume otherwise dismisses their own intellectual capacity. Readers should know better than to judge the conversations of a book exclusively by lines taken out of context or by their own personal connections to the work, like some malicious Amelia Bedelia.
The concept of neutral representation also grants readers agency in their own discussions of books. “I don’t know” is not a bad phrase; it allows for a world of possibility. “This doesn’t work for me, but it might work for you” isn’t an attempt to pass the job of judgment to another reader. Rather, it reflects an understanding that stories connect with people differently. It allows readers to be better advocates for their communities and more critical thinkers. It uplifts stories without fracturing communities.
And frankly, admitting that something is imperfect without taking that imperfection personally is, in this era of social media, a goddamn superpower.
I believe, in my heart, that readers are smart. Readers like to think and engage with the books they read. They want to have conversations with the stories and listen to the conversations that those stories are having with society. That is why I love bookselling. I don’t think readers need their hands held. I think they deserve a range of representations as wild and varied and wonderful as they are.
I think you deserve a range of representation as wild and varied and wonderful as you are.
☠︎
What happens when some readers feel a book contains productive representation and some readers feel a book contains reductive representation? Some readers may say, “This book represents how I feel about my experience with cancer,” while others say, “This book recreates the harmful cultural narrative it attempts to subvert, making it reductive,” and still others say, “I think it was disrespectful to the memory of Anne Frank that they made out at the Anne Frank House in the book, even if that is a thing teenagers do.”
What happens when there’s disagreement? What happens when a book is all of the above?
I don’t know!
But I do know that the current framework doesn’t work. I know that shifting a framework to a less morally fragile ground for discussion, where the onus isn’t on individual readers but on community engagement with full texts, is necessary if our goal is fostering more nuanced and interesting books and less harmful inter-community attacks.
What happens after that?
I also don’t know! Everything is complicated! It’s messy! It’s not clean cut! There are complicated discussions that can and should be had about these topics without fear of being declared a terrible person for having them. I don’t know what happens when this framework gets used! I don’t know what happens next!
And I think that’s swell. And I hope you do too.
☠︎
One of my favorite teenage customers came to the store last week. Let’s call her Elle. She’s 14, queer, and reads more voraciously than anybody else I know. She told me when she was 8 that she wanted to own the bookstore one day, and we are both counting down the days until she can apply to work at the store. Despite being a proper teenager now, she always goes out of her way to say hi to me when she’s in the store, even if she’s with her friends.
When I asked Elle what she had just finished reading, I was surprised by her answer: A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. It’s a deeply traumatic book that has been simultaneously touted and called problematic by the queer community. I asked her what she thought.
“Well, I thought it was homophobic trauma porn,” said Elle. “But it was beautifully written. I can see why people really love it. I also thought it was a good representation of trauma, even though I found it to be too much. I don’t think I could recommend it, but I’m glad I read it.”
“You talk with more nuance than most adults I know,” I told her.
She laughed. “I think it’s because my parents let me read what I want.”
Elle wandered back off to the shelves, phone in hand and her eye out for her next read, and I was left wondering how she understood the point I was trying to make in the numerous drafts of this essay better than I did. A Little Life might be homophobic; it might also allow queer people to see themselves. It might be senseless trauma porn; it might allow trauma victims to experience some relief in seeing their own stories and feelings expressed on the page.
I often return to something the novelist Ottessa Moshfegh wrote in response to the question of what “risky books” she’d like to read. She wrote, “Art is not media. [...] A novel is not BuzzFeed or NPR or Instagram or even Hollywood. Let’s get clear about that. A novel is a literary work of art meant to expand consciousness. We need novels that live in an amoral universe, past the political agenda described on social media. We have imaginations for a reason. Novels like American Psycho and Lolita did not poison culture. Murderous corporations and exploitive industries did. We need characters in novels to be free to range into the dark and wrong. How else will we understand ourselves?”
Art is activism—but art that flattens itself to fit within a small-minded moral dichotomy of representation is not. The things we write and the things we read don’t encompass everything that we are. Life is full of too much variety for that. It would be impossible to cram the beautiful nuances of humanity into a handful of texts deemed acceptable. We need to be more thoughtful about how we engage with discussions of representation in narrative forms of art—and we need to be more mindful of how those conversations affect people who see themselves in characters that might be less than perfect. Who might be less than good.
None of us can be good all the time. Why do we expect characters to be? Why do we expect authors to present perfect universes when what works for one reader does not work for another?
Within this new framework, there is a space to disregard books that do active harm. There is a way to put aside reductive texts that do little to help and much to hurt the lives of people in marginalized communities. There is a way to uplift books that break the mold and move conversations forward.
But more than anything, this new framework opens a space for books to simply be. To work for some readers and to not work for others. To represent some things well and some things poorly. To represent the same thing both well and poorly, depending on the reader. To allow characters to simply be present on the page.
We cannot continue to divide representation between moral binaries of good and bad. The world is so much more nuanced than that. Readers must trust each other—and allow authors to trust them—to engage with writing outside of basic moral absolutes. Readers are not brainless or useless, and characters are as complicated as humanity itself. If we can’t reframe how we talk about representation, representation will grow more boring, less diverse, and less interesting—and ultimately, books and readers alike will suffer for it.
Nicole Brinkley has short hair and loves dragons. The rest changes without notice. She is the manager of Oblong Books and the host of the Misshelved podcast. Her opinions are her own. Follow her on Instagram at @nebrinkley.
This essay was edited by Stephanie Appell. Read more of Stephanie's work at bookpage.com, where she is the children's and YA editor, or say hi on Twitter @noseinabookgirl. Her opinions are also her own.