Wiscon Day 1: Panels, People and 101

[bcholmes]

Friday. For much of the morning, I hung out in the hotel lobby watching the world go by. Pretty much everybody comes through the lobby, so it was great to see so many people. I had lunch plans with kalmn and Ian H., and as we were waiting for the magic 11:15 gathering time, lcohen came by to suggest that Ian H. might have possibly forgotten. I think she was even betting money on this outcome. But lcohen is a lying liar who lies, and Ian showed up only a few minutes late. In the end, we snared hobbitbabe to join our lunch outing. And lcohen even though she's a lying liar who lies.

And so we went to the noodle place and noodled. (Book discussions: The Gift of Fear)

Afterward, Ian and I went to the feminist bookstore, and I found a book by Susan Stryker. How come none of you told me that Susan Stryker had written a book? We also saw badgerbag at the bookstore. I think badgerbag is full of awesome, but I'm too shy to say that around her.

We talked for a bit in the lobby again. He was telling me about a movie he saw about the Yes Men, and now I really want to hunt down a copy. The last movie recommendation that he gave me was for The Weather Underground, which I loved.

I popped in, very briefly, at the gathering, wanting to see the shapenote singing. And while I was there, I ran in to maevele; I don't think we'd ever met before in person, so that was cool. And not long after that, I ran into wild_irises and got the quick update on new stuff from the last year. Then I went to the Cultural Appropriation 101 panel.

Several years ago, wild_irises asked me what I liked best about Wiscon, and my response was that it wasn't 101. So there is a little bit of wistfulness in me that the con is doing more 101. I can't say that it's not needed, but I'm wistful, nonetheless.

The panel was well-handled. We all, ritually, were forced to swear that we'd respect the safety of the space. And there were exercises. It really wasn't a panel: it was a class. Nisi Shawl, cabell and Victor Raymond were the panelists.

Cultural Appropriation 101 Workshop

Do you feel that you've been burned by the cultural appropriation debates? Have you been told that you goodwill and effort aren't enough? This workshop will be a safe space for you to review the basic concepts around race, colonial history, and cultural appropriation, and to build a vocabulary you can use at WisCon to discuss these topics. This will be a class, not an open discussion or a panel. We strongly recommend that anyone who wishes to participate in panels related to race and cultural appropriation participate in this class first. Presented by the Carl Brandon Society

Here were some of the topics that came up in the 101 panel:

• Power analysis
• Definitions and vocabulary
  • cultural appropriation (I've written down "the taking of artifacts or use of artifacts of a culture in place of people or characters", but that doesn't seem like a satisfying definition to me).
  • unmarked state
  • magical negro
  • identity tourism (like, when gamers play asian women in online games, and they reproduce their own stereotypes of asian women)
  • clueful
  • subject
  • tone, and its role as a weapon used by the privileged centre
  • aversive racism
  • privilege
  • racism (a system of advantage or privilege based on race)
  • derailing (When we hit this point in the panel, Victor said: "Let's not talk about that." The LOLs, I tell ya)
• Is there a concept of appropriate appropriation versus inappropriate appropriation?
• How to trade-off the idea that there aren't enough characters of colour versus complaints that some of the existing representations are really bad?

Two important book recommendations that I've written down are: Dislocating Cultures and Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?,

I think the most interesting moment in the 101 panel was when we took time to do two exercises from Writing the Other. I own a copy of this book, and I've read it. But I haven't ever sat down to do the exercises. It's kind of interesting how real that made the concepts.

(Panel transcript by badgerbag is over here)

The next panel I went to was We Do the Work:

We Do the Work

SF writers are supposed to be good at building compelling and believable worlds. So why is it so hard to build a world featuring working class characters in working class settings, especially given that a lot of SF writers come from that kind of background? What has worked for you? What hasn't? Who clearly hasn't tried? Who has tried, but failed spectacularly? SF fans have done a good job of demanding better-written women and minorities in SF; what about their working class counterparts?

I was a bit late to the panel, and it was a pretty full room, so I was sitting on the floor for most of the panel.

I enjoyed the conversation, although I didn't get quite as many notes. There was a conversation about working class characters in Star Wars: someone asked the question, "Who built the Death Star?" to which an audience member replied, "Robots." "Who built the robots?" "Robots." Someone later suggested that if robots can do all of the working class jobs, then they can do all of the jobs.

Most of the panelists seemed to think that part of the problem was that SF authors thought about their worlds in a top-down way -- this is the neat idea that they want the world to portray -- rather than a bottom-up way (who does the cleaning?).

There was an interesting, illustrative discussion about plumbing. Plumbing, one panelists said, is all about gravity? How would that work in a space station? Well, the theory went, it probably wouldn't work. There would probably have to be pumps all throughout the station. And pumps mean maintenance workers. Where are they?

Two interesting book discussions: one panelist cited Timescape as a book often credited for accurate portrayal of scientists, but the panelist felt that all of the working class people in the book were either stupid or evil.

Another panelist made a comment about Perdido Street Station: the latter half of the book, he said, was "a big overgrand Dr. Who episode." It made me grin.

As the panel went on about representations of working class characters, I found myself thinking about the importance of representation versus meaning: this was an idea I returned to on Sunday in the Marxism and Beyond panel. It's one thing to represent the working class, but where's the science fiction that really asks: why does the class system exist? Whose interests does it serve? How does it operate? What social machinery holds it in place?

I found myself thinking of a moment from the film, Battle for Seattle, a not-terrible film about the Seattle WTO riots. There's a point when two characters are reflecting on what they've accomplished, and one guy says, "Before we started this, nobody even knew what the WTO was. Now... well, they still don't know what it is, but they know it's something bad."

I have a coupl'a author names written down: Anne Harris and Melissa Scott. I don't remember the context.

Later, it was dinner with deepforestowl; we got caught up on stuff that's been going on in our lives over the last year. As I've been doing a lot, I was talking about how I'm debating making a radical change to my life -- thinking of quitting the job or some scheme like that that'll allow me to do more stuff in Haiti. I'll probably be pondering this for a year or two, and I don't know where I'm going with it.

After dinner, I wandered a bit aimlessly. I think I was getting a bit tired. So I went back to the room to nap a bit. I napped a bit more than I intended, and I was late to the Transgender Life in Taiwan panel. (I also missed the Not Another F*cking Race Panel, which everyone I spoke to universally praised).

Transgender Life in Taiwan

A presentation and discussion about transgender life in Taiwan. Some aspects of culture you might not know.

It was a bit of an unusual panel in that there was only one panelist, but it was informative. It's possible for a panel like that to be prurient -- I don't think it was, but I did ponder a bunch of thoughts about ethnography and stuff like that. The panel went well, and kept people's interest. I was pretty tired, so I didn't get any notes on the panel, though.

Later jiawen and I went up to the sixth floor, where the parties are. I chatted a bit, and wandered a bit, but I was still in something of a daze. I was probably back in my room and in bed by 1:00.