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

[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.