“Overrepresentation”

I’ve come across several references to the “overrepresentation” of minority characters lately, including remarks about my own work. (In my case, it’s been about LGBT+ characters.)

In theory, I assume overrepresentation means portraying a larger proportion of a particular type of character in your fiction than you’d expect to see from a sampling in the real world. For example…

Overrepresentation of white men:

Overrepresentation of straight white men:

Overrepresentation of straight little blue men:

Overrepresentation of male … whatevers:

And so on, and so forth.

Focusing on my own work — the remark was about the Magic ex Libris series — let’s take a look, shall we? I’m adding a cut-tag here, because we’re about to get into minor spoiler territory.

( Read the rest of this entry » )

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.