But there’s something screwy about this. Because...

11:59 pm - Tue, Jun 14, 2011: 7 notes

But there’s something screwy about this. Because the main moral lesson we – as good liberals – always want people to learn about race and sexual orientation is that folks are folks. People are pretty much the same, and the differences people are fixating on (skin color, who people want to sleep with) shouldn’t make a difference. If gayness were, literally, a red laser that shot out of gay people’s eyes, it would make sense to be homophobic. Homophobia and racism drape themselves, publicly, in prudential, civic-minded concern. X-Men-style mutation ought to be equal-opportunity allegory for homophobia and racism, as well as for liberal values of tolerance. They aren’t called the Virtually Normal Men, after all.

X-Men: First Class — Crooked Timber

How very fascinating. Now I’m filled with a desire to do a search and replace in “Black Skin, White Masks” with “mutant” and “human. (If you aren’t familiar, part of what “Black Skin, White Masks” is about is the painful experience of trying to be an educated, cultured, virtuous man in a certain context (in this case, France and its colonies) that pretends ideas of education, culture, and virtue are race-neutral (“folks are folks”) when in fact they are not.)

It also reminds me of something I often have trouble explaining to certain folks about some of Samuel R. Delaney’s stories:

For many heroes, aliens, and monsters in science fiction, fantasy, and comics, the character is an amalgam — secret identity+superhero identity, man+monster, etc. And this split enables other characters — but more importantly the author and the reader to relate to the hero or monster in a dual way. We are expected to relate to and sympathize with the “man” side of that split.

But in stories like “Aye, and Gomorrah,” or “The Star Pit,” characters do not have that kind of division. Their monstrosity and their power and their otherness go all the way down, and are inextricable. And we can only relate to them on those terms. And if we cannot feel ourselves to be other, we cannot relate to them at all.

It seems to me that the X-Men movies (I haven’t read much of the comics beyond Joss Whedon’s run on Astonishing) are, in a sense, about a conflict between those two accounts of difference. Professor X and friends want to see themselves, and be seen by others, as humans+. Magneto and friends are content to see themselves as inhuman.

Which just goes to underscore how very much I would like to see the next movie in the series treat the X-Men as villains and keep Magneto as the protagonist. Not because Magneto is “right”, per se, but because the view from his side is far more interesting and illuminating and challenging.

(via kukkurovaca)