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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Voranzovin" data-source="post: 8472484" data-attributes="member: 7020495">So, my personal experience of representation isn't about ethnicity. I'm an Ashkenazic Jew, and I'd be perfectly happy if I never saw anyone with my particular ethnic background in fiction ever again (not that this is likely).But I have experienced its importance in other ways. I have Crohn's disease, diabetes, asthma, and a herniated disk in my back. These conditions are pretty well controlled now, but that wasn't true in my twenties. They could be extremely debilitating, and I recall thinking of myself as, essentially, less than human.One of the things that really helped me through that time was the Vorkosigan series, by Lois McMaster Bujold. The series is a space opera with elements of military sci-fi, but rather then starring a physically capable space adventurer type, it features Miles Vorkosigan, who was born with physical deformities and can't even run without risking a broken bone. This is sometimes an advantage to him, as the Bond villain-types he goes up against frequently underestimate him until it's too late. Seeing someone who had debilitating medical conditions saving the day actually helped restore my sense of self. Moreover, I would say that the series is very much about the experience of being disabled, and that this is precisely why it worked for me.Now Bujold does not, as far as I know, have any disabilities or debilitating chronic illnesses. Had someone told her she shouldn't write a story about the experience of someone who does, and she'd listened, I would have been denied one of the primary things that helped me get through that time.I don't mean this as a blanket rejection of complaints about writers who appropriate other people's perspectives, by any means. A lot of those complaints are no doubt warranted, considering how easy it is for writers to fall back on stereotype. Nor do I think that most of the people bringing up these concerns categorically reject all works that cross cultural boundaries--most object to those that do it badly, which is a lot of them because doing it well is difficult. But there are some people calling for that kind of categorical rejection, and I too think that this would be very harmful.</blockquote>

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