Maybe They're Phasing Us In: Re-Mapping Fantasy Tropes in the Face of Gender, Race, and Sexuality

I'M PRIMARILY A FICTION WRITER, BUT I'M ALSO A CRAFTSPERSON. A FEW months ago, a craft project of mine began to morph in some really interesting ways. am not a visual artist, although as an arts consultant and former arts grants officer, I've done work in the visual arts community for years. primary partner, who is a visual and multimedia artist by training, convinced me that what had was a budding mini art installation. In fact, it dovetails quite nicely with a photo-based art project that he's currently developing, so he and have been talking about perhaps having a joint show sometime down the road. That's a frightening and exhilarating prospect for me. could probably safely say that flopsweat has driven much of my artistic development, so I've learned to pay attention to when an idea frightens me. Today I'm going to present the kernel of my project to you. The actual art piece is relatively small, but bulky enough that didn't want to lug it from Toronto to here. Instead, I'm going to give you something of a slide show. Presenting a work of mine that's 3D is something I've never done before. So this is a test drive, and you are my test audience. I'm hoping that you'll give me your reactions and can thereby improve the piece, which is part one of a project I'm calling My Little Pony Girl. First, a bit of preamble. grew up in the Caribbean, which, by nature of its long history of colonization and forced immigration, is quite a racially diverse region of the world. I've discovered that in North America, many people assume that Caribbean equals black and nothing else, but that's not so. Although black folks are in the majority, you can find every race under the sun there, and every possible mixture of races. I, while phenotypically and culturally black, also have Scottish, Jewish, South Asian, and possibly Arawak ancestry in my background. When you're a diasporic African, this is what black looks like. I've been reading science fiction and fantasy since was a child, including some of the core older works that inform the literature, such as folklore, ancient epic tales (Homer's Iliad, for instance), and dystopian and satirical fiction such as Gulliver's Travels. From those, it was a short step to contemporary science fiction and fantasy. also grew up watching all kinds of genre fiction on television and in movies; those were the types of stories preferred, and still do. was born in 1960, so that'll give you some sense of the era in which was a child watching science fiction, fantasy, mysteries, and westerns on television. No Blade movies, and only one Star Trek, with only two people of color as regulars in the cast. As a child, did vaguely wonder at some of the mind games that were demanded of me when there were depictions of race on the screen. For example, why did Charlie Chan look like Warner Oland, a Swedish actor, or, more recently, like British actor Peter Ustinov? But dutifully performed the mental gymnastics required. By the time I Dream of Jeannie came around--the first time--I was so used to it that it didn't occur to me to wonder why a djinni, a mythical Middle Eastern creature, looked like Barbara Eden? [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] And not more like, maybe, this? (See fig. 1.) And didn't wonder much about the fact that the overwhelming majority of people saw on the screen were white, even though whiteness, worldwide, is in the minority. Most of the films and television at that time were imported from the US and the UK, so one just expected that they would show mostly white people, as did the products in our grocery stores, the magazines we read, and the ads in our newspapers. That, thankfully, has changed as more and more Caribbean media have come into being. Still, the first time that someone said to me, when was well into my 30s, that the aliens and fairies and what-have-you in science fiction and fantasy could be seen as stand-ins for people of color, didn't know what they were talking about. …

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