Wiscon Day 2: The part I blanked on

I'm totally mistaken. It turns out that I didn't miss a panel just after lunch on Saturday: looking over my notes, it turns out I went to Vigorous Debate or Harassment:

Vigorous Debate, or Verbal Harassment?

One of the strengths of the SF community is that it's almost always open for discussion and debate. Unfortunately, when discussions get intense, the line between "vigorous debate" and "verbal harassment" can go from blurry to invisible. How can we tell when a discussion has crossed the line? What do we do if we're the one who's crossed it? How can we step in to call back a friend who's crossed it? Let's discuss how to recognize verbal harassment and brainstorm strategies for addressing it within a community where everyone is a friend of a friend.

Jess Adams, Andy Best, Michelle Kendall, Kate Nepveau, Maevele Straw

I enjoyed this panel, although I don't think it quite stuck to its panel description. A lot of people debated responding to fail.

Kate recommended "A themed summary of Racefail" as a good resource for understanding one of fandom's most famous fails. She also cautioned about two key phrases that might be warning signs that you're about to comment fail. One is "I don't mean to sound like a [racist|sexist|homophobe|transphobe|whatever] but..." I *think* the second phrase was "This may offend some people but..." I didn't write the phrases down, so my memory may be failing me.

Jess made a comment about using "active listening" techniques -- "It sounds to me like you're saying <this horrible thing> -- is that really what you mean?" She argued that it gave people the opportunity to weasel out of the implications of their words, which sometimes helped diffuse the situation. (She also commented that most people recognized weaselling for what it was).

One woman in the audience ran with that comment, saying that, in the workplace, negative feedback is always given to someone in private which allows people to save face. Me, I'm deeply suspicious of people's need to save face. I think that the whole "let me save face" reaction leads to tremendously fucked up behaviours.

Maevele bemoaned the fact that it's impossible to make the "OMIGOD I can't believe you just said that" face on the Internet.

There was also a bit of a conversation about what it means to "take it to email." It seems that sometimes people feel like public conversations should stay in public spaces, and that suddenly continuing the conversation in email can be seen as a hostile act. Some people seem to feel (especially with private mailing lists) that once something is off-topic, it should go to email. And an audience member talked about the difference in attitudes between, for example, Dreamwidth, where comments are threaded and, say, Disqus, where the comments are all in line. Interesting stuff.

Some points that came out of audience participation: one woman mentioned Charles Rules of Argument. The original site that these were on is having some problems right now, but I ganked this from Google cache:

Seeing as arguing is largely pointless, one of the best things to do is to severely limit what you end up arguing about:

• Never seek out things to disagree with. There are too many of them out there, and correcting the ills of the world just isn't your job.
• If you come across something you disagree with while randomly browsing, let it pass without comment (see rule 1). If it's truly frustrating, write a reply, then delete it without sharing it with anyone else.
• Even in the limited scope remaining, it is not your job to correct everything you find that you disagree with. Try to limit yourself to things where the subject is at least something that makes some practical difference to your life.
• Do not argue about politics, religion, or matters of personal taste or comparative morality.
• DO NOT argue with Lisp programmers, believers in the Semantic Web, or furries.
• Saying something controversial in your own space (i.e. your weblog) is only arguing if you directly reference somebody you are disagreeing with (or it is clearly understood in subtext who you are disagreing with), and that person is likely to give a shit about what you said.
• If someone disagrees with something you've said, you're already in an argument. See below.

Once you find yourself in an argument, your job is now to make your point clearly, and then leave. You are allowed two passes:

1. State your case
2. Clarify any misunderstandings

Having read that, I can't say that I fully agree with it.

Another recommendation for making argument go a bit more smoothly was to make your case much more concrete.

I asked a question about looking for strategies when discussing oppression with other minority groups. I specifically commented that some of the worst, ugliest conversations about racism I've had have been with white trans women. And, y'know, that is sadly true. The panelists started to talk about the dynamic of "more oppressed than thou," but that wasn't actually the dynamic I saw. It was more, "I know what oppression is that that's not it." I probably have to add this: many of the white trans women I know are perfectly lovely and I can't imagine them ever being the kind of doofus that I'm describing here. A number of white trans women I know (especially on the internet) have been actively involved in promoting anti-racism. And yet, I know a lot of white trans women, and they are diverse in their attitudes.

(I did not complicate the question by raising the other point that frustrates these kinds of discussions: the way that "privilege" discussions are often used to try to exclude trans women from women-only spaces resulting in, I believe, a knee-jerk reaction to conversations about privilege.)

Later, one woman in the audience made a comment that I took to mean "we really need to inculcate an Internet-wide notion of etiquette" which, I confess, made me anxious. The history of etiquette, I believe, is that it has long been a weapon to browbeat people who are not like you. I think Kate made the comment that etiquette can be enabling as well as restrictive, and I agree with that.

The last part of the panel talked about, basically, when it's okay to warn people that certain folk are creepy debaters. One particular name was attached to this conversation -- for the sake of anonymity, I'll call that person Phil Betterly. At what point is Phil enough of an asshat that it's okay and meaningful to post preemptive cautions about how creepy, vile and/or intellectually dishonest his debates are? Is it bad to agitate for his shunning? I think that this part of the conversation really touched on the whole, "when does it become verbal harassment?" question. Or maybe it's just trying to overcome the Geek Social Fallacy that ostracizers are evil? No clear answer came to this question -- people acknowledged that Phil has kinda-sorta taken his ball and gone away for the time being, so it's not a pressing concern. But it's the sort of question that probably needs to be pondered.

Edit: One of the audience contributions, here, that I should have mentioned was the discussion of predator theory -- the theory that some really icky people (such as, for example, rapists) constantly test pushing other people's boundaries. Also: book recommendation for The Gift of Fear.

It was a good panel. Also: Jess was a really good moderator.

Thought for the Day

I have this comment written in my notebook, between the notes on the class panel and the vigorous debate panel. Beyond that, I can't remember where it was said:

If you have a group of people who all agree, you don't have a movement, you have a cult.

Wiscon Day 3: moar panels, moar voices

Sunday, I had my traditional breakfast with Alan, where we got caught up on each other's lives. Then I went off to see "The Personal Is Political Revisited":

"The Personal is Political" Revisited

The title of Carol Hanisch's 1969 essay "The personal is political" became one of the best-known slogans of the feminist movement. Women were challenged to see their life circumstances not as individual situations of choice, but within a broader context of gendered oppression and societal structural inequalities. The panelists will look at the intersections between the personal and political in their activist work, and will examine the meaning and relevance of the slogan today.

Susan Marie Groppi, Susan Simensky Bietila, Alan Bostick, Karen Ireland-Phillips, Pamala K. Taylor

The panel had a lot of different things to say, although the relationship back to the original essay was often tenuous. Pamela had a lot of interesting things to say about her relationship to her headscarf -- that she'd recently started removing the hijab as she entered menopause and was frequently felt odd not to have this element that had been a big part of her identity. She commented about how, because her name isn't obviously middle-eastern, without the headscarf, she's just "American", whereas with the headscarf, she's Muslim.

She also had a lot of interesting things to say about work that she's done to oppose gender segregation in mosques, and create alternative spaces where women can lead services. She also talked about how imposter syndrome factored in there for her: when she was asked to lead a service in Toronto (?), she was deathly afraid, and doubted that she was really the right one to do so. Then she thought: she has a degree in theology, and has been on the forefront of the issue. If she wasn't qualified, then no one was.

Both Karen and Susan talked about being a part of feminist organizing in the 60s and 70s. Susan, in particular, talked about meeting Hanisch and knowing about being exposed to the essay very early. There were things that were interesting to hear them talk about: Susan talked about working in the schools and being confronted with young women who she described as aggressively anti-feminist. And also how that's internalized by the young women in question as "that's just what I like."

Karen talked about identifying as a "political lesbian" and her transition as someone who wore the official uniform of lesbianism -- plaid shirts and corduroy -- into someone who wears dresses. I also enjoyed hearing Karen talk about consciousness-raising groups -- there was some discussion about the extent to which one dimension of big Internet discussions (such as Racefail) use many of the same practices of consciousness raising. We didn't get too deep into that, but I enjoyed it. One thing that was said, though, was that consciousness-raising needs to happen in the context of a larger movement, and I idea that I enjoyed.

My favourite part of the discussion was a bit relating to burn out. One audience member -- Valerie Aurora -- talked about working in FOSS, and about how most of the FOSS women she knows have burned out and are backing away from the environment. How do you combat burnout? Some members of the panel suggested that the idea of burnout was a myth, an idea that I don't agree with.

Some of the interesting parts of this conversation related to being supported by the community around you. Ian offered, from the audience, that sometimes having a really good ally was better than having another person who was experiencing the same persecution. (Someone mentioned that "networking" is not a tool reserved for yuppie scum... we should all build up our own personal networks). Pamela talked about the times when she was close to burn out only to recall the people who came to her to say that some thing that she'd done had really changed someone's life. Moments like that fed her reserves, and helped her keep going.

But, in the end, as someone commented, "you put on your own oxygen mask, first."

There was a long conversation about housework... much longer than I thought it needed to be. Essentially, the question is "how do I get my partner to see that they're not doing their fair share of the housework?" The longer the conversation went, the more it was awash in gender essentialism, which, oh joy. Various options were offered: fill out timesheets, hire a (fellow member of the working class) housekeeper, or just mutally agree to do less housework. I'm always a bit surprised that nobody suggests "don't live together" or "buy a duplex." Book suggestions: Wifework and The Politics of Housework.

Afterward, I chatted a bit with Valerie Aurora -- I wasn't familiar with her or her work, and I was interested in hearing what she did in the FOSS world. Moments after I started talking to her, a guy from the audience came over, interrupted me, and went on and on about how awesome it was to run into Valerie Aurora. It was the kind of "oh, cool, I just rubbed elbows with a celebrity" kind of one-sided conversation. And, I confess, I was pretty annoyed, given that he interrupted a conversation already in progress, and didn't give any indication of even noticing that he'd done so. And what a statement that made. It's almost as if the personal is political. Or something.