One of the hardest questions; is it better to have clumsy representation, or less representation? Because no matter what, a greater effort requirement amounts to a higher barrier of entry. We don’t owe an artist anything, but at the same time should we say “If you don’t understand a group of people well enough to represent them, you shouldn’t be doing art.”?
JRR Tolkien notoriously has very few very impressively represented women, which kind of just gets a shrug from the fandom. But you can only tolerate so much of that before you just have a small selection of archetypes on pedestals. You get the sense from so much media produced by men, that they think women only (should) make up <25% of society. If they don’t matter to a male protagonist then they don’t matter. I think it should be fine to clumsily represent a group, as long as it expands representation rather than restricting it. And continuation should be dependent on an expectation to grow.
Case in point; The Apu Problem. Despite Apu from The Simpsons being the worst of both worlds, by virtue of originality he was acceptable at conception. Failure to grow with the franchise’s popularity, however, means that he established his own stereotype and by extension The Simpsons created it’s own racism. By the boiling frog effect, The Simpsons creators just get to dismiss is it as a product of it’s time “Oh you know things that weren’t racist are suddenly racist now shrug what’re you supposed to do?” But they’ve had the power to do better for a long time, if they were willing to face the problem long enough to learn and address it permanently.
The USA still hasn’t had a (official) female president despite multiple opportunities, because women in America don’t want “that kind of representation”. Society can keep representation from slacking, without letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
There absolutely is a limit on bad representation. Eg, when it crosses over into bigotry/discrimination it has gotten way past clumsy into evil. (Minstrel shows are most evil for being the limited “representation” of the time.)
I like the nuance of your example though; Because it doesn’t explore a most major facet of being deaf, does that mean the story shouldn’t be told? If there are already stories about being deaf in a mostly hearing society, then a story about an entirely deaf society explores another angle of being deaf or what it could mean to be deaf. Imho I think that should still count as valuable representation. While it’s fair to criticize it as not representative of the entire experience of being deaf, it’s not fair to criticize it as opposition to deaf interests. You can read/watch the two side by side and get greater perspective. Yet in a vacuum, it would be bad representation.
In contrast Menwritingwomen content gives an expression of how certain men perceive of women. Many of these men being perfectly amicable and good to women in their own life while harboring these toxic/bullshit perspectives we wouldn’t even know about. Despite that many even write some women well, they absolutely deserve to be criticized for opposing women’s interests. Some aren’t even useful for getting a perspective on how the author perceives women, being that individually they seem so normal until the overall writing reveals a pattern of bad representation. They all absolutely ought to be reconsidered for women writing women mediocrely in the same space wherever possible. Accepted for the representation (in context) they are otherwise. Excised, canceled, buycotted only when the work functions to explore & validate the author’s bigoted values.
On one side “Disney villain” has not crossed that threshold even if they aren’t the female representation (some) women want, at least they’re novel and diversify representation; whereas “There’s one woman and she’s cool and hot” has crossed the bad representation threshold even if she represents how every woman of that demographic wants to see herself. (Sorry I’m mostly referencing women’s representation in art, it’s an accessible example because there’s so much variety in failure for what should be statistically easy representation).