I want to sift through your fingers, to vanish, to be unseen

June 30, 2021 9:35 AM

In January 2020, Isabel Fall published "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter" in Clarkesworld; in April 2021, it was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Novelette. Now, Fall talks about the brutal attacks that killed the person she had hoped to be in Vox. “The story was withdrawn to avoid my death,” she says. “It was not withdrawn as a concession that it was transphobic or secretly fascist or too problematic for publication. When people approve of its withdrawal they are approving, even if unwittingly, of the use of gender dysphoria to silence writers.” Isabel Fall, previously on Metafilter.
posted by tavella (4 comments total)

This is a sensitive and nuanced piece.

But, I can't help but see, in some meta-irony:

..... what this story really symbolizes is the fact that as we’ve grown more adept at using the internet, we’ve also grown more adept at destroying people’s lives, but from a distance, in an abstracted way.

kind of like....an attack helicopter?
posted by lalochezia at 10:00 AM on June 30, 2021 [3 favorites]

I hadn't read the short story (besides seeing its name) at the time, or heard about these events -- and it just makes me so sad that readers will simply fill a vacuum with terrible shit.

Embrace the uncertainty, you know? If an author doesn't want to open their lives to you, call them "reclusive" and leave them alone.

The story sounds like a really neat idea that I would like to read, but thanks to assholes it had to be removed. I hate that assholes killed art, much less that they killed someone's hoped-for, dreamed-of self.
posted by wenestvedt at 10:00 AM on June 30, 2021 [2 favorites]

The delineation between paranoid and reparative readings originated in 1995, with influential critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. A paranoid reading focuses on what’s wrong or problematic about a work of art. A reparative reading seeks out what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art, even if the work is flawed. Importantly, a reparative reading also tends to consider what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art for someone who isn’t the reader.

I appreciate this idea of reparative reading and I thank VanDerWerff's article for introducing me to it.
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 10:02 AM on June 30, 2021 [5 favorites]

i remember being at exactly the right time when the mefi post was made so it was a trip between reading the earlier comments, reading the story and enjoying it, and coming back to the back half of the post.

one of the persons quoted seems pretty both-sides in their recall of how it went and their involvement in it, well, based on my recollection on how it went down.
posted by cendawanita at 10:04 AM on June 30, 2021