Loncon: Feminism and Sexism in Fandom

This is going to be a not-report for reasons I will get to.

Description:

Fandom has a rich heritage of exploring gender roles, sexism, misogyny and patriarchy. In current fandoms there are repeated discussions of the problems associated with fandoms includingDoctor Who, Supernatural, Harry Potter, X-Menand Game of Thrones. Fans write detailed meta incorporating popular terms such as fridging and the Bechdel test as well as more complex cultural theory. Yet, at the same time, there is a common trait in fandom, especially media fandom, where sexually active female characters are slut-shamed, women who are perceived to interfere with the popular relationships on a show (whether canonical or not) are vilified, and fan works recreate heterosexism. Sometimes actresses playing characters receive online hatred and bullying while fans who criticise the sexism of an object of affection are rejected by fellow fans. In this session we explore ways in which (largely) female fans engage with feminism and misogyny within their own communities.

Megan Waples (m), Katherine Jay, Kristina Knaving, Kate Keen, Kate Nepveu

Here is what I wrote yesterday:

This was a very wide-ranging panel, so much so that I kind of have no idea how to talk about it.

Uh, here are links to two things of mine that I mentioned at the panel: How to Discuss Race and Racism Without Acting Like a Complete Jerk, which has a good deal of applicability to discussions about all kinds of oppressions; and An Introduction to Mary Sue and Her Critical Uses and Abuses.

. . . my brain is not working right now. Um.

In no particular order!

Removing sexism and other oppressive attitudes from one's reflexes is hard. Everyone is at different points in journey.

( cut for racism )

Anyway! After that I did not get back to these panel notes until now, which is mid-day Sunday. There was other stuff yesterday (more anon) and then I saw some criticisms of me on Twitter and I thought about going to another racism-related panel to be supportive and I wanted to cry at the thought of someone being an asshat again, so I went back to bed. (It's early in the con to be hitting the wall, and yesterday was objectively not that bad, but all the tourism before was catching up with me, I think.)

So. The panel started with Megan, as the mod, asking us to express / vent our rage in a really good yell, which was surprisingly easy to summon (at that point I wasn't actively angry about anything!) and very cathartic. Megan also shared a story of a woman she knows getting a fat-shaming Tweet from someone at the con about her outfit.

We acknowledged that gender is not a binary and that sexism, homophobia, and transphobia are all connected, but I'm not sure how good a job we did after talking in non-binary terms, for which I apologize.

My notes for the panel ahead of time, besides the links above:

* Intersectionality can be hard. Listen and be empathic but don't assume that one experience of oppression maps to another.

* Fanfic: if your reason for not writing female characters is that they're poorly characterized in canon, you should, and I mean this with love and support, sit down and think hard about that, because what fandom does is take underdeveloped characters and develop them (and give them fandom-eating pairings, in some cases *cough* Clint/Coulson *cough* ).

* Need for female-led/dominated spaces.

* Things to do:
** Call out sexism you see
** If you can't or can't yet (and it's hard, though it gets easier): support people who do by commenting, retweeting, reblogging, emailing, etc.; promote fests for underrepresented characters, leave comments or kudos on works that feature underrepresented characters, make the fanworks you'd like to see. Little bits really do matter.

Other panelists added teaching and supporting kids and young adults in your life (your children or the children around you). Sexism exists in fandom because fandom is part of society.

That's almost nothing to report on from a ninety-minute panel, so if you were there, or if you want to ask about if something was brought up, please do.

Loncon: The Canon is Dead. What Now?

This was my last panel of the day, but I'm going to write it up before the other remaining one, because it had an upsetting thing at the end that I'd like to clear off my list of things to talk about.

Description:

On the one hand, initiatives like the SF Gateway are helping to ensure the SF backlist remains accessible to today's readers, and an increasing number of "classic" SF writers are receiving the establishment seal of approval in series like the Library of America (Philip K. Dick) and the Everyman Library (Isaac Asimov). On the other hand, the SF readership is increasingly diverse, with fewer readers who have come to the field via those "classics", and many who find little of value in them in any case. In other words the traditional SF canon is no longer tenable -- but the history is still out there. So what alternative models and narratives should we be using to understand the field's past? Should we be working to expand the canon, or to describe multiple overlapping histories -- or something else?

Kate Nepveu (m), Connie Willis, Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, Chris Beckett, Joe Monti

I saw criticisms of my moderation from a person on Twitter, who thought I talked too much. I will not apologize for one of those instances (or for believing that I have things to contribute to the panel beyond just setting discussion in motion), but there were some points where I could have been more concise, especially since this was another 50-minute panel.

I asked by asking why we want to convey genre history: is it different for readers and writers, or between fantasy & SF? I said that I thought it was genuinely useful for fantasy readers to read _LotR_--though less so than twenty years ago--but I wasn't sure the same was true for SF, since the commercial genre can't be traced back to a single book that way.

I think the general consensus was that it was more important for writers. Connie said that when she teaches Clarion she hands out a 50-book list, because her least favorite critique is "this is a really good story that Bradbury did in 1952." Generally people agreed that writers should know the most famous plot twists/types; something of the genre conventions (insert here the thing about genre being distinguished, if not defined, by way information is conveyed to reader); and something about the major works in your topic area, otherwise you get mainstream writers thinking that they're saying something profound about robots etc. when genre readers are like, "done that back in 19-whatever."

(But tropes are different; just because someone's done "Adam & Eve in space" before, as one of the panelists, I think Chris?, had done, doesn't mean you can't. It's the gimmicks that only work once because of surprise, and even then if they're not well-known now . . . )

Somewhere pretty early people said that readers shouldn't read the canon because it's (medicine/work/homework--I forget the exact phrasing). They should read the canon because it's good (or the good bits of the canon).

I mentioned the rare works specifically in explicit dialogue with an identifiable thing: Peter Watts' "Things" (the movie _The Thing_); Neil Gaiman's "A Study in Emerald"—which I embarrassingly called "A Study in Scarlet" until the audience corrected me, thank you, audience—the latter of which doesn't work at all if you don't know Sherlock Holmes canon. But besides those, which are pretty easy to spot, what benefit can there be for readers to know genre history?

Connie said that every work is in some way in dialogue with others, because that's what storytelling is, all the way back to its origins. When she started writing her time travel stories, she made a list of all the things she disliked about existing time travel stories. Possibly here, Joe said that Ann Leckie hadn't read _The Left Hand of Darkness_ before writing _Ancillary Justice_, which both do things with pronouns and gender, but she was aware that _Left Hand_ existed and what it did, which he found surprising, but maybe it was hard to say what reading it would have added.

In response to a question, the panelists were generally not in favor of authors making that kind of inspiration/works-being-referenced explicit to the reader, in afterwords or suchlike, because it's so much fun for readers to make those connections themselves, and if they don't, the works ought to stand on their own anyway. It's to enrich the understanding not to create it. (Somewhere prior to this I'd said that I was of the view that The Author Is Dead, and though I heard some objection to that from the authors on the panel =>, at this point I believe at least one person said okay, maybe The Author Is Dead after all, at least somewhat.)

I'm fairly sure about this point we were running very low on time, so I said, here are the other things I was hoping we'd talk about, let me rattle them off in case they spark questions from the audience. (This is the bit I won't apologize for talking.) They were: what multiple overlapping histories (mentioned in the description) might consist of: subgenres, groups of authors working together, publishers . . . ?; other ways these genre histories might get conveyed: reviews, Wikipedia, Encyclopedia of SF?

I learned a lesson about myself as a mod here: because the panel was on the same level as the room, I stood up to see people and point at five people to ask questions in order. But when it was time for the next person I should have stood back up, because it turns out I rely on physical locations of people and I couldn't remember who was next, which was awkward.

Unfortunately the only question I actually remember at this point was the thing that was upsetting, a.k.a., ( In which Connie Willis and I disagree whether the historical formation of the canon excluded women and minorities )

Until that point I had been enjoying the panel quite a bit, and I do think there was fodder there for more discussion. So further thoughts would be welcome, from anyone. However, I am going to screen anon comments out of an abundance of caution: if you're new here, please review my commenting policy. I will unscreen comments as soon as possible.

Loncon: I Before They, Except After You

This was the panel immediately before the prior one and it was lovely, which is why I saved it for last.

Description:

Who is the narrator? Where and when is the story being told? These are just a few questions a reader may ask at the start of a new story. For many years, third-person has been genre's preferred narrative form, but lately it seems first-person narratives are having a resurgence. How do writers choose their viewpoint, and how does it affect the sorts of stories they can tell? Why is YA so often told in first-person, and epic fantasy generally (but not always!) third? To add another layer of complexity, the present tense also seems to be increasing in popularity -- Lauren Beukes' Zoo City and Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus are just two notable examples. How does the use of present tense change a reader's experience?

Kate Nepveu, Robin Hobb, Patrick Rothfuss, Edward Cox, Maureen Kincaid Speller (m)

(I don't know how the order of names is generated on the program list.)

I think the con generally is having a lot of trouble with its available spaces, because this was in one of the smaller rooms and there were likely as many people waiting in line outside hoping to get in as where outside.

I was a little nervous about being on this panel, because look at those other names! But everyone was generous toward other panelists conversationally and it really was a conversation, it was so much fun. (You all know I could talk about point of view and narrators basically forever.)

Maureen had us introduce ourselves in our preferred POV. IIRC, Ed tried third and found it surprisingly difficult; Robin and Pat both used first; and I (who had the advantage of going last) started in first and then switched to third, and ended with "she may or may not be fascinated by unreliability in narration."

We talked about a million things. The limitations of first-person, and how they'd got around it by the frame story in the Kvothe books or the found documents in the first Assassin's trilogy. I talked about floating first and concrete first, where it's never explained how the words get on the page or where a specific mechanism is mentioned. Pat said that floating first will always get the author asked how the words are getting on the page, that someone will care; toward the end, we had a talk about the history of POV in novels that I can't reconstruct now, but that I think came down to the origin of first-person in face-to-face storytelling, was carried through in the frame story idea that was once obligatory and since has been dropped (I met a mysterious stranger who told me this story, I found this manuscript), and it's been recent enough that the obligatory frame story was dropped that people aren't quite accepting of "the words just get on the page somehow, darn it" as the price of admission to that work.

There was the obligatory shout-out to Peter S. Beagle's The Innkeeper's Song, which is multiple-first and brilliant; Pat said it was currently out of print but "I'm going to fix that."

We talked about multiple viewpoints; Pat blamed the sudden explosion of really-multiple-third on A Song of Ice and Fire, but Martin has been honing his craft for decades, new writers are allowed a maximum of three. Also, people try to go right to the action by shifting POVs but that can actually remove suspense. Robin choose POV for the best-situated character and then stayed pretty tight with them, but also employed an omniscient sometimes to show competing understandings of situations and so forth. I mentioned an unpublished friend who generally constructs their multiple-POV book on the theory of "who in this scene knows least," because that allows for dramatic irony and the reader making connections and so forth, and how I'd suggested that maybe at plot or action-heavy moments might be a time to step back from that principle. (But I don't know how they solved it yet because the W is still IP.)

(In terms of cutting to the action, I mentioned _Ancillary Justice_, of course (booklog discussion of POV.))

Uh, what else? We talked about omni with a present narrator and how fun that can be: Catherynne M. Valente's _Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland . . . _; _Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell_; Lemony Snicket. We talked briefly about sex: I observed that romance is generally in third, while "chick lit" is in first, and while I don't know about professionally-published erotica, I don't see a lot of first-person fanfic. I sort of thought this might be because for people who read with themselves in the place of the first-person narrator, there would be too much of a disjoint if a scene was very physical or physically-based emotional, but that was just a theory--which can't account for "chick lit." (Pat had previously said that he made a distinction between character-based stories and plot-based stories, and that the former got first-person and the latter got third, but that he's working on two things now that are in third and follow female characters from his trilogy, and he thought possibly that he instinctively went to third was because they were female.)

Someone in the audience asked about really rare POVs like second-person or future tense; no-one seemed particularly enthused by them, but as writing exercises to stretch your craft, sure.

There was a lot more, but I'm stumped now, and for some reason it's a million degrees where I'm writing this and I desperately need to hydrate before my next panel. If you were there, chime in, and if not, feel free to comment! (Seriously, could talk about this forever.)