WisCon Day 3: Sunday

[bcholmes]

The first panel I got to on Sunday was at 10. By Sunday morning, 8:30 is too hurtin' for me.

Passing Privilege
Members of minority groups are not always immediately visible or recognizable. Those who can pass as the dominant group have privilege from being able to do so. In what ways does this manifest itself? How does the extent of our passing privilege affect our viewpoints and experiences? What can we learn from other groups about the ways passing privilege works?

M: Julia Rios, Isabel Schecter, Elliott Mason

I'm not really able to fully articulate this, but I had an impression of this year's WisCon that we had more cross-sectional analysis than we might have had in years past. This panel is a good example: I could easily have seen this as a panel populated by trans folk talking about passing. That it instead was panel that covered passing in the context of race, transness, mental illness, etc., made it more interesting, without seeming generic.

Julia recounted an anecdote about a common school lockdown experience in her school: that the school would divide the students up by race ("latin@ students go to the gymnasium; african american students go to the cafeteria; everyone else go to the library") and she knew that the latin@ kids were gonna get lectured, whereas the "everyone else" group would get to read. I was really jarred by the idea of that schools would divide their students that way -- I suppose that's evidence of my own privilege, growing up in so-white-it's-blinding Sarnia.

While not trying to liken the stories, the anecdote reminded Elliott of the experience in grade seven, in which all the boys and girls are separated, and girls are taught about menstruation. Elliott mentioned that, to this day, he didn't know what the boys did in that timeslot. (In my school, it was just homework).

Oddly, the part of the panel that most "connected" with me was Isabel's conversation about her family, and her own "escape" from her history. It was during this panel that I started to really process and understand just how big a deal it was to me to visit my grandmother and aunt and cousin on the trip to Madison. And getting my grandfather's genealogy research. I'm strangely feeling more connected to my family than I have in years. And, oddly, a lot of Isabel's discussion about her family resonated with me deeply. I've seen Isabel on panels in past years, and I never really imagined that I had much in common with her. And yet her stories really hit home.

In a panel the previous night, I told a story about sitting in a room with my cousin, and being fascinated by her accent. She speaks an accent that, to me, is quite pronounced. It's a little bit Michigan-sounding and a little bit rural. And I remembered, as I was listening to her, that I deliberately changed my accent while growing up. My own childhood was marked by dreams of escape: of flight to a more refined and cultured world. There were limits on my ability to imagine that world, but I thought I caught the glimpses of that world in James Bond movies and BBC series. Naturally, I knew that to "pass" in that world, I'd need an English accent and proper grammar. (I don't think my accent sounds English, but it also doesn't sound Sarnian.)

So it was really interesting to hear Isabel cover similar ground: she talked about how carefully she suppressed her own accent, and how deliberately she changed aspects of her character, her speech, her bearing, etc. But also about how some of her family members shunned her as she changed these things. She had a number of anecdotes describing moments that highlighted how aware she was that the person that she was presenting herself to be was carefully constructed. Isabel also talked about how WisCon helped her better come to terms with and re-embrace her family origins -- she used the term "Retro-Acculturation", which I quickly jotted down in my book.

Now, I do think that there's a way of talking about the difference between trans passing ("we are finally seen for who we really are") and other types of passing ("we're concealing an aspect of who we really are") that I find a bit facile. I remember keeping in mind a particular claim about gender markers as I was transitioning: that because the unmarked state is male, it takes four female-gendered markers to counter the effect of one male-gendered marker. If one has a deep voice, or broad shoulders or what-have-you, it is possible to downplay that tell with enough female-gendered markers. I used to think about this stuff all the time: it took energy and it took work to think about it, to incorporate it in my life, and to pay attention to whether or not the passing was successful. I don't think that makes my womanhood artificial in any sense, even if it did require work to get the average person to see it. And I am aware that I am, at the same time, working to conceal a truth about me -- that I am trans -- because letting people see that truth operates against getting them to see my womanhood. I suppose, in simple terms, I'm trying to acquire the benefits of cis privilege in certain circumstances. And that, I think, is the sometimes problematic aspect of trans passing.

(Here's a comment that I had been thinking about raising if and/or when the class panel discussed intersectionality. I have a good job in a high-demand area of technology. I am paid very well, and my company likes me a lot. But any time I imagine changing jobs, I always quickly think about how my transness is going to affect a job hunt. If you google my name, essentially every link on the first page of Google results refers to me: my blog, my Google+ account, my website. I'm out on the web, and I choose to be out on the web. But I'm always very clear about the cost.)

Anyway, as I said, I found myself powerfully affected by parts of the panel I didn't expect to be powerfully affected by, and I pondered this panel a lot afterward. I was glad to get together with jiawen for lunch at the (lcohen: don't read this!!!) Indian place behind the hotel, and we had a really good lunch conversation.

After lunch, I caught:

Choice Feminism
Many people say that feminism is about providing more choices for people. There are people who, faced with this variety of choices, choose the same thing that the kyriarchy would have chosen for them. Is this problematic, or is this variety a strength of feminism?

M: Ian Hagemann, Gayle, Lisa Cohen, Penny Hill, Marna Nightingale

I liked this panel, although at times I think that it was too comfortable. I think that some panelists wanted to talk in comfortable generalities when I was interested in more gnarly issues. And, y'know, the panel had Ian on it, so my expectation of gnarly was high.

For example, one panelist kept reiterating that "women shouldn't make choices on behalf of others." At some level, I don't even know what that statement means. I can take it to mean anything from "women should not agitate for legislation against stay-at-home-mothers" to "women should never seem disapproving of any other woman's life choices." Thing is, I often think that when people say stuff like "women shouldn't make choices on behalf..." that they mean something closer to the latter than the former. And I'm not sure I agree with that in the general case.

I tried to problematize the topic by asking a question rooted in The Paradox of Choice: that when faced with a large number of choices, many people experience choice paralysis. And, more importantly, capitalists know this and orient a lot of their practices around exploiting choice paralysis: much of brand name management, for example, is based on giving people something to grasp on to in those moments of choice paralysis so that they can get out of paralysis and choose a well-branded option. My question was, if that's true, and feminism is trying to state that options A, B, C, and D are all valid but the kyriarchy is pushing ALL 'A' ALL THE TIME! then aren't we, at best, only ever going to approach real freedom of choice only asymptotically? Isn't it ethical to be biased to the options that are not-A, knowing that A already has a cheering squad? I think the first response I got to this question was, "well, I don't think women should be making choices on behalf of other women." Le sigh.

And then boxofdelights asked an amazingly good question that really grounded the panel, and made it all much more real. I was really blown away by her question, and the variety of responses that she got. That link to the question, though, expresses even more nuance than was clear at the time.

After that, the panel moved on to some complex topics, but I think they were topics that weren't anywhere near as grounded in people's lived experience (for this particular set of panelists). Ian raised three controversial topics (although I can only remember two): female genital cutting and wearing of the burka. Later, one of the panelists told me that she wished that these topics weren't just sprung on them in the panel, and that they could give well-thought-out responses. And I grok that. Me, I partially think that the fact that it wasn't the panelists lived experience made it necessary to think carefully about good responses.

In the end, I liked the panel, but having read about how the panel was originally conceived by the person who proposed the panel, I think I would have preferred that panel instead.

How to Make WisCon Affordable
WisCon is an empowering event, and more people should get to participate. But journeying to Madison, finding a place to stay, and affording membership are all difficult, much less being able to buy a dessert ticket. How have we been able to make it affordable for ourselves? In what ways could WisCon become more accessible for poor people?

M: Benjamin Billman, L J Geoffrion, Jesse the K, Rachel Kronick, Laurenn McCubbin

I liked this panel, and thought that a number of really interesting topics came up: shuttle services, roommate coordination, fan assistance fund (renaming the "scholarship"), the hotel, and so forth. I was sitting near wrdnrd who was typing frantically during the whole panel: I hope that means that she was taking notes and will post a longer panel description. Or that she was writing the great American novel. One of those, anyway.

One of the interesting ideas that wrdnrd raised had to do with the dessert thang. The panel talked about the fact that the dessert salon is a contentious part of WisCon: many people really like it, and many people really feel that it divides WisCon along class lines. And also that it only barely pays its own costs. Wrdnrd suggested having it, but collecting donations -- call out the fact that the donations are to pay for the cost of the dessert salon, and people taking part are more willing to donate.

There came a point, though, about half-way through the panel, where Victor joined the audience, and the whole nature of the panel shifted. What the panel became, after that, was Victor responding to all the suggestions by explaining the constraints on the choices that WisCon had made to date. For example, a suggestion was made about helping coordinate people who were planning to drive down to Madison, because it make travel more affordable. Victor responded, calmly and non-adversarially that WisCon is really short of people who will volunteer to do the work and this is another job that there aren't volunteers to staff. I totally got where he was coming from, and all of the things he said were informative, but I did feel like the tone of the panel changed from "imagining ways to make it better" to "defending the status quo" and I can't say that I really approved of that change.

And while I was thinking that, there was an exchange in which jiawen raised the idea of holding WisCon at the university campus and someone from the audience Explained to Her The History of WisCon That She Clearly Needed To Appreciate. And I snapped. I raised my hand to make a comment, and when I got picked, I called the guy out in not-subtle terms. Oops. After the panel, I approached him to apologize for being as sharp as I had been, but he said that he did take my response in a positive way, which made me feel better. But I still felt a bit awkward about it all for a while afterward.

Hey wrdnrd, please tell me you have great notes.

Dispelling Trans Myths
Trans women think about things other than make-up! Not all people who have penises are men! Hormones are often more important than surgery! Some people don't even want surgery! Some trans people have non-tragic lives! Come and have your mind blown.

M: Rachel Kronick, Elliott Mason, BC Holmes, s.e. smith

I'm not sure what to say about this panel. I think it went well. I got lots of positive feedback about the panel after the fact, and the other panelists had similar accounts. Elliott put a lot of work into a hand-out which was well-received (Rachel and s.e. provided a lot of feedback about it, but I think that Elliott did most of the heavy lifting). The two things I most wanted in the panel -- humour and mind-blowing-ness -- seemed to be there. The audience laughed a lot, and we suggested a quick hand-signal for mind-blowing that allowed us to gauge the extent of mind-blownness; that percentage was high by panel's end.

I'm also really glad to have gotten to know Elliott and s.e. through being on this panel together. I hope I get to know them even better at future WisCons.

There were a lot of topics that we threw around in our email conversation that we didn't get to talk about: I wanted to talk about trans rage (and anger policing of trans women), and the cotton ceiling, and the Ugly Thoughts, and DIY transsexualism. I'm always interested in the stuff that trans people don't discuss in mixed company -- is that just good manners, or is there some shame that we harbour? There was a veritable cornucopia of mind-blowing topics that we could have broached. Mind you, I'm a little bit shell-shocked about some of the things I did say on the panel, so I'm not sure how easy it would have been to go to some of those conversation points. Hm. How shall I say this? It's easier, sometimes, for me to be more direct about trans stuff online than it is in front of a room full of people. I recounted a story in front of a room full of people that I think I've only ever said out loud three or four times. <shrug>

My co-panelists are already thinking about a follow-up panel for next year. Will there be any horses left to scare? (Won't someone think of the horses!?!??!)

Afterward, it was dinner at the tapas place (I feel a bit bad about the restaurants who so clearly don't have any idea that WisCon happens that weekend: they're like, "oh, shit, it's that thing again!"), and then walking the party floor, and finally off to the dessert salon. I never stand in line for desserts (and I also never seem to get a good spot to sit -- probably related), and this time I got there pretty late. But jiawen and Ctein kindly kept me company. Andrea's speech was marvellous and theatrical. I howled when she quoted her aunt, saying, "Let's do the impossible; it'll take longer and be more fun!" It was a beautiful, multi-media performance filled with family, and heart, and humour and the Psycho music. And then Debbie followed that with an amazingly powerful speech about generosity: about giving and taking. It was a magnificent, in-depth treatment of the topic that I think really touched a lot of people at WisCon this year. It did not surprise me that she got a standing ovation. badgerbag had made comments, online, earlier in the con about how it seemed so right that Debbie was one of the guests of honour this year: that she's given so much, in so many ways, to so many people at WisCon. And that speech was a gift from her as well. You're amazing, Debbie, and I'm happy to have you as a friend, and I don't know that I've let you know that enough.

And that was my Sunday. I didn't make it to any evening panels. I did sit with a few people in the con suite during the party time, but I was pretty beat and turned in early.

Comments

[laceblade]

I hope wrdnrd took notes, too! Multiple members of the concom have started talking about this, and having an actual list of things discussed would be helpful.

[wrdnrd]

BEHOLD, Wrdnrd has great notes! I intend to post them on my blog (wrdnrd.net [cough]), but it may not happen until after Paris (i.e., early july).

B.C.: I was really, really glad you called out WisCon History Dude. I found myself on the verge of explaining to his disbelieving face how, indeed, too close a tie to academia IS off-putting to people because it can be very classist.

[bcholmes]

I don't know if you saw it, but holyoutlaw was looking for notes about the "making WisCon affordable" discussions from WisCon 36. Did you ever get around to posting anything?

[wrdnrd]

Look at me replying months late! I have been very lazy with my panel notes. :( Now that this is firmly back on my radar, i hope to get notes up ... this weekend-ish? /hangs head

[kalmn]

i suggested the choice feminism panel and then was scheduled against it and it sounds like it was really good. aaaagh. darnit.

i agree with you about the what about if a choice is so strongly rewarded by the kyriarchy. but then there's also all the people who i love dearly who have made exactly those choices. and there's boxofdelights's point about freedom of choice, lack thereof. i need a gripping hand here.

[wrdnrd]

Also: I think your observation that Victor's presence shifted the room to a more "defending the status quo" aspect is a fair point. Tho' for myself, i was able to appreciate his comments from a "this is what we have to work with / around" perspective. That could just be me, tho' -- i come from a long line of fix-it people. :P