Messy Art
Content notes for non-specific, non-graphic mentions of sexual assault and child sexual abuse.
‘Messy queer art’ discourse comes around every other week or so, and I’ve always found it frustrating because no one can really agree on what it means. In fandom spaces, peopled tend to say it to mean ‘art where queer characters aren’t perfect and/or queer art that isn’t soft pastel fluff’ (sometimes without regard to whether the art is made by a queer person!), which I find flattening. ‘Messy queer art’ is supposed to mean art where queer characters can abuse, be abused, die, commit suicide, rape, get raped, whatever is being positioned as the opposite of fluff—it’s sometimes synonymous with ‘edgy’.
Let me explain.
In the Starcraft franchise, Sarah Kerrigan runs around doing a bunch of genocides. In World of Warcraft, Sylvanas Windrunner runs around doing lots and lots and lots of war crimes. I think we can all agree that calling either work ‘messy straight art’ sounds a little silly—there’s nothing messy about them, they’re as mainstream as you can get, and very arguably there’s not a lot of art to Blizzard products. To some extent, I think when people say ‘messy queer art’ they mean not art that engages with queerness in difficult or complex ways (depicting internalized homophobia, say, though even that is covered often enough by cishet trauma vultures) but art that has the same range as art made by the privileged, the majority, the normative. It is art that permits itself to break the framework of respectability politics and reject the requisites of societal oppression. So, in other words:
I think queer art that rejects all that—that is written without catering, pandering, or apologies—is crucial; I strive to write it myself, and I consider it essential scaffolding to my post-colonialism. To reject the hegemonic core and to reject cisheteronormativity must, for me, go hand in hand. It is an intentional act toward seeking liberation.
But I also don’t think I write messy queer art (war criminal protagonists who inhabit queer-normative worlds and all) because my relationship with my queerness is straightforward, and the way I write queerness corresponds. My characters don’t have internalized homophobia (with rare exceptions due to dystopian or historical circumstances) and they haven’t been subjected to abuses or traumas related to their gender or sexuality. I feel what I’m doing is simply about normalization of queerness: that queer characters should have access to the full range of humanity, yes, and be accorded the same dignity as anyone else. But I’m not especially interested in queer ambivalence; that’s what I associate with ‘messy’ rather than characters simply being morally ambiguous or amoral. Put another way, my characters’ moral ambiguity rests in their life choices—to embrace violence, to relish power—and they would’ve chosen the same if they had been cishet. There’s no specifically queer messiness in these characters. Their queerness is like the mountain or the sea, absolute and unassailable.
(To make it perfectly clear: I don’t think ‘messy queer art’ is bad. People should have as much space as they want to untangle their queerness or engage with it in complex ways. What I want to do is distinguish between ‘edgy’ and ‘messy’.
Does ‘messy straight art’ exist? Well, Nabokov was a CSA survivor who wrote Lolita. Which is a condemnation of Humbert Humbert, sure, but that doesn’t stop people from reading it in a counter-authorial way.)
Aurealis Magazine gave Now Will Machines Hollow the Beast a very nice review!
Now Will Machines Hollow The Beast is the much-anticipated new book in the Machine Mandate universe by Benjanun Sriduangkaew. While it does exist in continuous universe, the story is remarkably self-contained. It’s crafted over detailed space-opera setting that feels similar to the universes in contemporary Tor novellas like the Murderbot books or Corey J White’s Voidwitch Saga, but unique, offering authentic South-East Asian cultural references and a refreshingly queer-normal setting.
The book exudes power, from the first chapter to the last, and manages to describe a protagonist who is at once untouchable, amoral, but not entirely inhumane, without making her seem unbelievable or impossible to change. I found her personally relatable towards the end, especially when she discusses her history, her trauma, and the psychological tricks she uses to maintain her power.
It’s not what you would call an underdog narrative however, which is probably the book’s biggest strength. It’s a story about a group of cybernetic lesbians who’ve ignored power structures built for them to fall into subservience and created an alternative that’s strong enough to exist as an independent force—a revolutionary feminist subtext with a guide to personal empowerment which feels radical and timely, but completely unpretentious.
The sex scenes are also fantastic, not just for being deeply queer and vital to contextualising the relationships between the characters, but also for using the technology that exists in the world.
To be honest, I’m not sure if I’ll read a better book than this in 2021. It’s fast-paced, exciting, and does everything right. Check it out—you won’t be disappointed.
On the WIP side, I’m working on the book taking place after Shall Machines Divide the Earth, sharing some of the characters. It’s a bit of an experiment in unreliable narration, in addition to being psychological horror (sort of like ‘Autodidact’). At the moment this means the narrative is much less action-packed than my other Machine Mandate books, which I hope is par for the course for psychological horror (where protagonists don’t typically gear up and set out to shoot the source of horror to death). We’ll see how it shakes out during revisions, but I’m enjoying building the cage of psychological manipulation, borderline brainwashing, and a slow dismantling of the self. There is pseudo-cannibalism as an amusing hobby for a secondary character, whom I’m codenaming the Horrible Femme. She loves to cook. The lab-grown meat looks like her ex and she turns it into delicious, delicious dishes.
(This is the book where the setup is ostensibly a garden of innocence run by AIs, with a deeply traumatized soft butch Eve figure meeting and being seduced by a hard butch Lucifer figure. And, you’ll finally get to see the thread that connects Machine’s Last Testament to the rest! The AIs running this facility are inadvertently taking up Samsara’s legacy, and for that there will be a price.)
I’m rewatching parts of RE:Creators, which is a piece of media I think about (warning for lots of spoilers) every now and again. I still would have liked them to go all the way with the whole lesbian thing, outside of the whole ‘I love you’ episode title, but otherwise it’s such a unique show with such a… deceptive premise? Like, from the sound and looks of it, it’s a reverse isekai with a teenage male protagonist and we all know what that means, right? I almost passed over this show initially and I still don’t remember why I decided to give it a try, but the basic synopsis certainly didn’t prepare me for a work that takes an honest look at artistic jealousy and how a mild-mannered boy protagonist is a very unreliable narrator of his own sins. While I don’t love the veering into ‘hehe this guy who made the romance visual novel is a total perv’ stuff, well… I guess that is what a lot of men who make that sort of thing would be like, it’s just that they don’t usually get to grope their own teenage girl creations in real life. Could’ve done without him literally chasing her around to try to molest her, though.
It’s not perfect, but it’s a great piece of work and most of the female characters are genuinely great. There’s a Madoka homage! Well, two, and one of them is a frame-by-frame recreation with a very different conclusion, in a ‘resurrect our lesbians’ sort of way. There’s a very strong rewrite-your-ending theme that I appreciate: you can do it again, and this time you can save her.