WisCon: Friday

[bcholmes]

Friday's always a bit of a slow day at WisCon. There was a great panel, mid-afternoon, about how to moderate panels the WisCon way. I really enjoyed this panel. The panelists (including the amazing wild_irises) demonstrated some wonderful strategies for dealing with problem situations in panels: the long-winded speech-maker who will never relinquish the floor, the person who says the horribly offensive stuff, etc.

The panelists made great use of well-directed pleasantness. wild_irises used one strategy, in particular, in which she responded to the "person speaking offensive things" with something like, "you've made a lot of very interesting points; I wonder what the audience feels about them?" I have a great deal of admiration for the power of effective pleasantness, but I know that it's not a place that I live in. Nonetheless, the panel was so good, I found myself thinking about it a lot in the context of having to moderate a panel later in the evening.

My panel was one I proposed. "Counting Past Two", a panel about thirdness and strategies for getting outside of the binary. My dream was to have a panel that got a bit farther than something I'd seen the previous year: a panel in which many people articulated their positions as sitting outside the binary. They got to say, "hey, other alternatives exist" but there wasn't a lot of deeper analysis about what thirds mean to social structures. I wanted to explore positions such as "the utility of the third is its potential to destroy well-entrenched assumptions about society" or "all binaries are going through a constant process of hybridity, and hence the essentialness of the binary is suspect."

From the point of view of what I wanted out of the panel, I don't feel that it was a success. I think some of the panelists didn't have the background to make the kinds of arguments I was hoping for, and some hadn't really given a lot of thought to the panel beforehand. So I was a little demoralized. But, strangely, I ended up getting a ton of good feedback on my moderating style, which made me think that maybe the panel accomplished something good, even if it wasn't the good thing I was hoping for.

Comments

[firecat]

201 panels seem difficult even at Wiscon. At least more people are open to the ideas presented but if they haven't thought about those ideas much before it can be hard to come up with good new insights about them.

Meet 11:30 in lobby for lunch?

[bcholmes.livejournal.com]

Sounds great!

[okoshun.livejournal.com]

Do you have any time to join us for a meal before the con is over? We leave Monday morning. If not, we *do* live in the same city. East African cuisine was being considered for dinner (just beside Kabul on State St.) but we're flexible.

[bcholmes.livejournal.com]

I'm getting together with a coupl'a people for Sunday dinner; wanna join in?

[okoshun.livejournal.com]

Sure - there are 3 of us - is that okay?

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

I thought that you did a good job moderating as well, and dealt with some situations effectively in ways that kept things flowing.

I was kind of hoping that the panel would have gotten into things a bit further. I did like the point that was brought up about the third rather than being just another category, opening the space for other categories to fill. That clarified something for me.

[jiawen]

You did do a good job moderating. It was kind of a 201 panel, in some ways; a lot of people, it seemed to me, were busy beating different topics with the "third" stick, trying to analyze as many topics as possible with the idea of non-binary ways of looking at them.

I kinda thought it would've been deeper had it only been about one kind of thirdness: gender, how able-bodied you are, or something like that. Keeping it open to other categories let too many categories get dumped in; we kept accumulating data without doing any analysis, I guess you could say.

But the fact that some disabled people like binary ways of looking at things was very interesting, and I think illuminating.

Anyway, the panel did a lot of good, and you helped it by moderating well and saying lots of interesting things.