Wiscon Day 1, Part 2

Things I've forgotten to mention. I went to a bit of the Gathering this year. There's something about the Gathering that often brings out the worst of my social anxiety; I can't explain it. But I went to the Tea and Zines table and chatted with wrdnrd, raanve and littlebutfierce. I got to hear some interesting talk about zines (which, I confess, I've never really had much exposure to). Plus, raanve caused interpretive jazz to happen. Um. On the subject of mortality. So, that was interesting.

On Friday night, I had a fun dinner with erik at the little Nepali place that I like so much. Then I came back and attended a panel:

Where are Your Gods?

Where are your gods? On or off the page? Do you choose to publicize your beliefs or do you keep them private? Do you choose to risk alienating more traditional readers by an alternative spiritual path or do you stand up as an example? Do you feel ostracized for holding more traditional or conservative beliefs? Does your spirituality inform your writing? Can you be a monotheist but build a world of many gods? How important is it that your audience knows where you are coming from? Join us for a discussion of the role of personal religious belief in your writing.

P.C. Hodgell, Ada Milenkovic Brown, Suzy Charnas, Moondancer Drake, Valya Dudycz Lupescu, Pamela K. Taylor

They covered a lot of ground in the panel. I especially enjoyed Pamela Taylor's and Moondancer's contributions. There was some discussion about cultural appropriation, and a lot of talk about fictional pantheons. There were some angles that I would have been interested in hearing about. Like, for some reason, I really enjoy films about the Catholic priesthood. Priest (1994) and The Order and The Rite and films like that. Some of these films are supernatural films that accept that Catholic doctrine seems to be the truth. I've never been Catholic, but I nonetheless enjoy the films, and am willing to just take the theology at face value. So I wonder: how comfortable can a writer be writing about an existing religion as if it's real. (I've only read one of the Archangel books by Lyda Morehouse, but I suspect that's a similar example).

She was never posed this question, but Moondancer's responses seemed to suggest that her sense of authenticity seemed to come from keeping the stuff that's true in her life true in her books. Others described saying what they wanted to say about religion in one book, and then never really going back to that for fear of seeming like they had a particular bugaboo.

Eventually, though, the panel mostly devolved into a bunch of book recommendations.

Immediately after that panel, I went to do a quick volunteer job, and then hung out on the party floor for a while before heading to bed relatively early. I've been fighting a cold for a few days, and thought that an early night would be a good thing.

More Wiscon: Day 2, the Beginning

My first big debate with myself about which panel I was going to see was Saturday morning. I couldn't decide between an Intersectionality and Feminism panel, and a Class panel. Both had good lists of panelists. I ended up going to see the class panel:

Class Issues in Science Fiction and Fantasy

It's not been easy for the SF community to come to terms with class. In a society where the working poor and the unemployed are growing in number, and the middle class is being destroyed, it's vital that we discuss class. Let's build on our discussions of class at Wiscon 34, which included a powerful Class Basics panel, to discuss class and class warfare in SF as well as the real world.

Eleanor A. Arnason, Jess Adams, Beth Plutchak, Fred Schepartz, Alexis Lothian

This panel was the first panel in which I started to develop an opinion about a dynamic going on at this year's con. I feel like we have an interesting influx of people who've become politicized by the protests in February/March. And I don't want to sound as if I'm saying, "oh noes we're totally being invaded by people who are not us", but I do feel like the content of their contributions has been much more "worker power rah rah rah" and not quite in the geeky analytic way that I'm accustomed to.

I mention this because I feel like the panel was very divided in the way it wanted to explore the panel topic. One part of the panel very much seemed to want to voice this idea that something profoundly important was happening in Wisconsin at the moment, whereas the other part of the panel wanted to analyze the nooks and crannies of class hierarchies, looking to expose how the operate. These two halves of the panel, in my opinion, often didn't seem to be talking to each other.

Eleanor opened the panel with two different ways of "defining" class. The first was a traditional Marxist categorization: worker, capitalist, and petite bourgeoisie. The second seemed to be a more modern Western categorization. You're poor if you fall below the government's definition of poor. There is no government definition of rich, but we all know that the rich are up there. And everyone in-between is middle-class. Eleanor clearly did not want to get too mired in definitions and wanted to move quickly away from that part of the panel, but I think that it deserved some thought.

Alexis did a good job of trying to broaden the definition. She talked about a few things: the expectation that, in the US, education was often perceived to be a way to move up the class ladder, whereas in the UK, people retained their identification with their class background even if they went on to higher education. Some groundwork was laid for viewing class as multidimensional.

(Note to self: think about the relationship between the multidimensionality of gender and the multidimensionality of class. There are many axes of gender: presentation, socialization, bodies, etc. Why am I not better versed in language to talk about class similarly?)

I particularly like where Alexis was going with this. I think there is something to the US/Canadian (I think they're more alike than dissimilar) view of class that is bound up in valuing "skill" rather than "work". Most criticism of unions seem (in my opinion) to have, at their root, a belief that there are people who do certain types of jobs don't deserve to make a decent wage because they're the jobs that people with choices don't choose. Education/skill gives you choices ("I had to spend 4 years in university getting drunk and partying a lot so I deserve a white collar job!") whereas people who pick up the garbage... well, that can be done by anyone.

One exchange that was in equal parts hard to watch and hilarious was observing orangemike trying to educate Alexis on how, in the US of A, simple things like one's accent can be a very strong class marker. Because Alexis, coming from the UK, must clearly have no frame of reference for this. Alexis responded kinda sharply, and understandably so in my opinion.

Then the panel moved on to writing about class, and I can't say that I loved any of this analysis. Except, maybe, for the way that Jess really pushed for more concreteness. It's one thing to say, "I address a bunch of class issues in my latest book," and quite another to elaborate on what "address" looks like. I don't feel like we got a good example of "address", but I really liked the way that Jess tried to push the question.

There was a very brief discussion about agitprop. I wish we could have pursued that more. It occurred to me that if one is looking for somewhat bolshy SF, one kinda has to find some good recommendations from people. There are certain subgenres that lend themselves to a particular political viewpoint: if you pick up any military SF, you probably have a good idea about what political viewpoint it'll echo. Is there any subgenre that is more obviously aligned with any leftist political position? ("China Mieville" is not a subgenre) Jess made a funny comment about how she reads fantasy, liking to identify with characters that seem a bit more like her crowd of people, except that occasionally the main characters are secretly the king.

Pretty much by this point, we were open to questions, and a lot of the questions were grounded in the recent protests. There wasn't much more geeky analysis in the panel. Which kinda saddened me. I'm reminded of a panel, oh, four years ago, I think, at which Eleanor said: "A rally is an action that is lacking in analysis." That comment went through my head a lot during the panel in a way that was probably not particularly useful.

A few times, I considered asking a question, but was half-hearted about it. I'd put up my hand for a while, and then drop it, and then put it up for a bit again later. Unsurprisingly, I didn't get called. I was waffling between asking the question about bolshy subgenres and asking about how one looks at the way average people react around things like "unions" and not conclude that people have been persuaded to act against their own class interests. I hadn't fully figured out the wording -- I didn't want the question to essentially argue that people are dumb. Like I said: half-hearted.

It wasn't quite the class panel that I wanted, but I appreciated it for some moments.