chocolatepot | (Reply)

From:

I was thinking about all of this more last night after I went to bed and wrote down some kind of jumbled stuff, which I'm going to try to sort out.

I'm starting to think that for "appropriation" to be a useful concept, it's more about intent than privilege. It does need to be about taking something from a less privileged culture, whatever degree of less-privileged-ness, but intent might actually be a larger part of it. It is possible for someone to take up, say, a religion from a less privileged culture and believe in it sincerely and treat it in a respectful manner; when people actually call appropriation, it tends to be because a person or group is taking up something in a disrespectful way, ignoring the context and warping it to fit their needs and desires. Which would make the post fall under both appropriation and fetishizing. The view of it only being appropriation if it's a specifically underprivileged culture, which I think is a relatively common one, is part of a somewhat toxic emphasis on determining which groups are underprivileged enough to count as oppressed.

I suspect part of my problem with the original post and her later comments is also that it does not line up with my experience of the UK or Edinburgh at all. I judge it more harshly than someone else might because I was there for a significant period of time and spent barely any of it musing over fairies and goblins, and literally never had anyone be hostile to me because I was American, ever, in any of the places I went, from London to the highlands, from Cardiff to Bath. The opposite, actually. (On occasion I had a little tiff with a flatmate which I ranted about on my LJ and probably came off like an embarrassing, clueless American, and I think it added up and I lost an flister over it. But it was more because she was a never-compromise sort of person and not because she had a beef with me over American politics. The flatmate, I mean.) So it especially seems ordinary for anyone to make la_marquise_de's points, which especially makes them not an attack worth going YOU'VE RUINED BRITAIN FOR ME over, or leaving them out in the cold while RH spits viciousness at them.

The US has a history of distilling countries into myths and stereotypes, all countries. And then selling the fake versions back. And American tourists have a tendency to travel in those countries and act like the myths are true, and then write more about the myths when they get back. I just don't see the point of deciding it's okay to perpetuate that as long as it's the "right" countries.