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jeannette_ng's profile
Jeannette Ng 吳志麗
Jeannette Ng 吳志麗
Jeannette Ng 吳志麗
@jeannette_ng

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Jeannette Ng 吳志麗

@jeannette_ng

Novelist. Won: Astounding, BFA Newcomer. Dabbles: history, costumes, sensitivity reads, #booknails. She/they. Repped by @jenniegoloboy

North East, England
medium.com/@nettlefish/
Joined January 2017

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    Jeannette Ng 吳志麗‏ @jeannette_ng Apr 5

    We should be able to do textual critique of problematic elements (especially when harm is often in repetition than in individual instances of cringe) without it being all about a fundamental lack of ethics on the part of the author.

    11:07 PM - 5 Apr 2021
    • 812 Retweets
    • 2,953 Likes
    • Kara Harte Salty Raygor✨Incoherently💖Emotional✨ Kakuzan literate biped Alejandro Colon hannah bee reads Aria Bradley ChoaticIdiot
    13 replies 812 retweets 2,953 likes
      1. New conversation
      2. Jeannette Ng 吳志麗‏ @jeannette_ng Apr 5

        The point of literary analysis shouldn't be to separate out works into the Elect and the Damned. It's not a quest to find the one pure and unproblematic work. Nor should it be all about ferreting out secret bad people through their opaque word codes.

        3 replies 235 retweets 1,242 likes
        Show this thread
      3. Jeannette Ng 吳志麗‏ @jeannette_ng Apr 5

        Of course the moment you find out someone is terrible, this will often change your reading of their books. Innocuous lines could gain much more uncomfortable readings. Implications crystallise. You don't give the author the benefit of the doubt anymore.

        2 replies 60 retweets 803 likes
        Show this thread
      4. Jeannette Ng 吳志麗‏ @jeannette_ng Apr 5

        But that doesn't necessarily mean you could have always known. That you could reliably ferret out racists through the magic of textual criticism. That every line of cringe is a secret dog whistle.

        1 reply 45 retweets 760 likes
        Show this thread
      5. Jeannette Ng 吳志麗‏ @jeannette_ng Apr 5

        The most prominent example is of course JKR. Given how public her radicalisation was and how substantial her political support for transphobia is, it doesn't have to be about the books. You don't need to double cancel her over the cringe-y way she names Asian characters.

        3 replies 17 retweets 588 likes
        Show this thread
      6. Jeannette Ng 吳志麗‏ @jeannette_ng Apr 5

        But I feel like this is a recurring thing. We talk about authors like they're the sum of their works, that art can only be read through a single lens of moral worth and message, that it can't be messy metaphors and inconclusive meditations, screams of pain distilled into words.

        2 replies 64 retweets 756 likes
        Show this thread
      7. Jeannette Ng 吳志麗‏ @jeannette_ng Apr 5

        It's a very limiting lens to view art. Sometimes we write ourselves as the bad guys because we are sick of handwringing moral guardians. Sometimes we write about tragedy not to punish or to romanticise, but as a memorial. Sometimes we write a power fantasy because it's just fun.

        2 replies 87 retweets 772 likes
        Show this thread
      8. Jeannette Ng 吳志麗‏ @jeannette_ng Apr 5

        But even my tweet feels limiting. Not all explorations of dark themes need to be justified by personal trauma on the part of the author.

        1 reply 45 retweets 684 likes
        Show this thread
      9. Jeannette Ng 吳志麗‏ @jeannette_ng Apr 5

        And the point of problematic stereotypes is that they draw on this vast morass of culture, that they develop endless clusters of associations, that their roots run deep. It's incredibly easy to evoke one without realising. To reenforce an idea without thinking.

        2 replies 46 retweets 631 likes
        Show this thread
      10. Jeannette Ng 吳志麗‏ @jeannette_ng Apr 5

        I am alluding to the great baggage around Asian stereotypes again. And what I've previously titled "why I can't just repeat to you my uncle's favourite dog-eating joke". I realise this thread is just an unwieldy redux of everything I've ever tweeted.

        3 replies 17 retweets 497 likes
        Show this thread
      11. Jeannette Ng 吳志麗‏ @jeannette_ng Apr 5

        But I'm begging our approach to art and analysis not be this straightforward game "problematic or not" that projects back to therefore the author is a good or bad person. And I'm not just saying this because I wrote a dark book with dark themes. It's just a boring way to read.

        16 replies 171 retweets 1,022 likes
        Show this thread
      12. Jeannette Ng 吳志麗‏ @jeannette_ng Apr 7

        PS: I also deeply dislike balancing "good rep" & "bad rep" in a book as though on some sort of absolute moral scale. I'm not sure it works like that. But it is true that I can get something out of a book that speaks to me & also find something else in it eye-rollingly insulting.

        1 reply 22 retweets 168 likes
        Show this thread
      13. Jeannette Ng 吳志麗‏ @jeannette_ng Apr 7

        And I'm sure there are plenty of eyebrows to be raised about what (or even who) gets to be a "problematic fave" and what sinks without a trace. But I keep circling back to how literary wack-a-mole isn't the best way to fight big tropes and recurring themes.

        2 replies 6 retweets 117 likes
        Show this thread
      14. Jeannette Ng 吳志麗‏ @jeannette_ng Apr 7

        I did also write "But we cannot allow the rhetorical use of little Asian girls waiting to be inspired by Mulan to silence this conversation about actual genocide" so obviously. Exception. But same token, it's not the film itself. It's the circumstances of its production.

        1 reply 3 retweets 93 likes
        Show this thread
      15. Jeannette Ng 吳志麗‏ @jeannette_ng Apr 7

        The film is a meandering pile of orientalist nothing but whilst I can decidedly see the shape of bad tropes and worse ideologies informing it, I'm not sure I can read in that like tea leaves the depths of Disney's complicity in genocide. Until the credits that is.

        0 replies 2 retweets 100 likes
        Show this thread
      16. End of conversation

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