WriterCon: *fail edition

[rm]

WriterCon has two types of programming: programming that is planned and panelists chosen by Con Programming, and programming organized by attendees and included on the official con schedule but not really endorsed or not by WriterCon. This, as you might imagine, can make things a little murky. I do like that both types of programming exist at the con, but I thought it needed more clarification in places. I explain this because it's necessary to some of the *fail issues I'm about to address.

I also want to note, in what I will go into in a separate post, that there were many, many things I loved about this con: including the focus on transformative works craft, the multi-fandom attendees and the really fantastic efforts of accommodation the Con Staff made towards folks with special needs, including dietary. I have never, ever felt like a con staff cared more about each of its attendees on an individual basis.

Which is why when fail came, I was like "woah, what the fuck?!"

Sadly, I think much of the fail is a product of the fact that people have become defensive. People are scared of these discussions, and I have to say while they are often unfun and heartbreaking (who wants to be the target of this stuff? who wants to realize they've hurt people or a community they care about no matter how inadvertently?) -- jeez they are not going to kill you, and they certainly aren't a reason to fail more.

Like most SF/F and fandom cons, only about 5% of the attendees were PoC. Honestly, this was more than I was expecting, and it was nice to see that these people were part of programming and not just on RaceFail-related topics. Also a plus -- lots of fliers for the Carl Brandon Society.

However, at more than one panel more than one person noticed folks avoiding calling on PoC attendees and had to step in and make sure those people got heard. FUCKED UP.

Of the official programming there was a single panel entitled "Evil in Our Midst: Dealing with racism, sexism and homophobia in fandom." Because of my flight schedule, I was only able to attend half of it. I have to assume it was placed towards the end of the con so that if it went badly, it wouldn't affect the mood of the whole con, but these issues can't be afterthoughts, and scheduling things in such a way to make sure the issue isn't infused throughout the con and prevents people from attending is really problematic. On the plus side, the attendance was pretty damn good anyway!

The panel was made up of a fantastically diverse group and was so able to encompass a lot of perspectives. However, the panel was moderated by a straight, white woman, and I couldn't figure that out. Did the PoC and queer folks need translation? Could they not speak for themselves? This was uncomfortable to me at the time, and has become increasingly more upsetting to me in my head (yes, there's the sexism angle, but because the con was more than 95% female, a white, straight woman in this case is totally a part of the dominant group and appointing her to the position of power was sort of creepy - no slight on her (ETA: who has subsequently posted some great stuff, linked to later in all this, about privilege -- so I get why she was chosen, but the impression is delivered sadly doesn't stop being problematic and I have to believe that other people on the panel would have been equally capable of moderating), I'm just not sure this was thought out super-well.

The panel was necessarily very 101-level although some really interesting stuff came up, including a discussion of Bollywood as a fandom (what does it mean when we fan an entire culture? are you wearing a saree because you like the aesthetic or because you're cosplaying? do you get how that impacts actual South Asian people?) and the usual vaguely derail-y things ("should our goal be not to offend anyone?").

Then I had to leave to catch my flight.

And then apparently other things happened that people who were there and people who were on the panel will address at more length and more accurately than me, but the phone call I got at the airport included the report that someone got up and said they felt marginalized for being straight and that they felt marginalized for being in a fandom and having a child, and I can't not address this. (ETA: I have subsequently learned that in small post-panel discussions the woman's point was actually about age-ism in fandom, which is a very real and legitimate problem, but hopefully those discussions also highlighted how incredibly fail-y and rude it was to say "am I not fucked up enough to be in fandom?" -- I'm not fucked up for being queer and my friends aren't fucked up for being transfolk or PoC: further insight into events here: http://community.livejournal.com/writercon/228157.html / http://rahirah.livejournal.com/411832.html (same post, different comments)).

I am queer every day. And every once in a while I get to hang out in a queer space, such that I don't have to worry if I'm dressing femininely enough to get through airport security or if kissing my girlfriend on my street corner at 11:30 at night is really the best fucking idea in the world.

And I get that feeling marginalized even for a minute is weird and can be heartrending. I get this specifically as it applies to fandom: a lot of us were outcasts growing up, a lot of us don't have face-to-face fannish communities to be a part of where we live, and when we go to a con, we want everyone to be just like us. We don't want to be outcasts -- not still, not again.

But I gotta tell you something -- and this isn't about bias and oppression and marginalization, it's just about life -- it's what I learned from fencing, from learning to fight: We all die alone. And we all fight alone. And we all live alone. On some level, we are always, always, always in a space where no one can know what we are feeling and how strange and terrible and lonely we are -- whether we're straight white guys or people of color or queer folks or a mom at a con.

And in being who I am -- someone who is melancholy and mournful, who views the solid presence of other people in my life as a one-in-a-billion craps shoot I can't believe I won -- you have all my compassion, all my love, all my sympathy and all my interest, because that is, innately, how I react to people who, like me, who know this nature of aloneness. You are beautiful to me.

But you need to step back. Because no, you are not marginalized or oppressed because you are part of the dominant group and people who are part of other groups are stepping up to say that we want some damn consideration. Nor are you marginalized or oppressed because you chose to have a kid. I spent most of the weekend with a woman who is second-generation fen and her baby; we wrote fic together, talked about slash and hung out with her wife. So no matter how different you may feel from what you perceive to be the majority of fandom, no one is being oppressed because they have a kid -- if someone's rude to you, that's actually something else -- the -ism's are something way beyond rudeness or you feeling awkward or out of place.

Look, I don't like being part of a marginalized group. It's not fun or romantic. Some of us -- both in these groups and outside of them -- have to learn this, just as many of us have to go through the thing where we learn there's nothing cool or fun about poverty or having to whore (as opposed to choosing to engage in sex work) to put food on the table or get the damn rent paid.

And that's about all I'm capable of saying without resorting to a great deal of obscenity, so I'm going to stop there on this particular part of the situation.

Moving on, I think no one is well-served by there just being one panel for the racism, homophobia and sexism conversations, as they are three very different things. Because transformative works fanishness is perceived as so female dominated (and probably is) the sexism discussion must largely be about internalized-sexism and that's a profoundly different conversation than the conversation about queer fetishization. And race issues are very different from that -- because I can look gender-conforming and straight going through airport security, while PoC don't suddenly get to be white when shopping, going through airport security or taking flack from asshole cosplayers who don't understand the idea of color-blind casting.

People who are family to me in the immediate sense (good friends and creative partners) and in the distant sense (fellow fen) are in pain over what happened, and so am I. It's upsetting, and as one of the panelists kept saying, we need to learn to listen harder and fail better.

The other case of (specific as opposed to atmospheric) *fail happened in a fan-led discussion that was about addressing slash how and whether it should take into consideration real, actual queer people. This panel also had much positive discussion, some of which started to get past a 101-level I thought, but the moderator had a clear agenda that, to me, felt like "those damn gays are meddling in our porn."

The discussion included a hand-out of potential discussion questions, many of which I found mind-blowingly offensive (I've made a deal with at least one other attendee that we're going to post them all with our answers on LJ over the next week or so), and the woman hosting the panel repeatedly snarked on our table (we were not the only queer people speaking up, but we could, rather legitimately, be perceived as a unified force, as it were) for being articulate and was particularly dismissive to the two PoC people at our table (and the combination of "articulate" and PoC is one of those very loaded, sneaky RaceFail things that happen sometimes and that was seriously, seriously sketchy).

I was shocked and appalled, and while some of this woman's viewpoint would have been potentially useful on a panel, to be an individual with an agenda on a sensitive issue with unvetted programming?!?!?! -- WOW. Not Okay.

Also, bisexuality is real. People not getting this came up all over the place -- in slash convos, in convos about internalized-sexism, in people chatting about Torchwood.

Finally, I want to return to the theme of defensiveness. We're now in a phase of this process, of talking about "the evil in our midst," wherein too many people are either bracing themselves for a fight because of the backlash the people speaking out are getting (I think of my table at the above-mentioned queer panel) -- which of course isn't necessarily constructive but something I think we have an unfortunate right to, or looking for a fight, because suddenly (like the straight person who said they felt marginalized in the first panel I talked about) they aren't part of the dominant group all the damn time.

Additionally, people need to stop dismissing conversations about these issues as wank. Wank is when we gossip about people's egos or get into flame wars about how someone behaved at a con or deal with things that make no sense to most of us: like Snape's Wives. Dealing with racism, sexism and homophobia = not wank.

So what good came out of all of this for me personally:
- I have even more love and respect for my friends, especially having watched ones who don't want to have to be the educators on these issues do it anyway.
- I met some really cool new people.
- I did see people have ah-hah! moments.
- I did learn that there are actually large swathes of fandom that missed the RaceFail thing entirely, and so were just sort of getting caught up on how big the problems are.
- I did see the larger community of the con close ranks against fail when it happened.
- I feel more confident in the value of my being willing to talk about this stuff. I don't like falling on this grenade over and over again, but since no one expects me to be "nice" or "non-threatening" or "look the other way" I have more latitude to say what needs to be said.
- I have new frameworks for the discussion.
- Hey, the Carl Brandon society totally deserves my money.

Comments

[wyld-dandelyon.livejournal.com]

If one person in a club is rude to you because you "suddenly" now have a kid, you can justifiably call it rudeness. However, if nearly everyone in a club is rude to you because you now have a kid, that is a form of oppression and marginalization, though in a microcosm.

There are MAJOR differences between that and being oppressed and marginalized in all of one's life, in all or nearly all social settings. And those differences matter A LOT. They are not only of scale, but also in many ways differences of kind. For instance, there's only one larger society; except in sff where there's a way to travel to alternate timelines, you're stuck with the one you have. You can't just quit the one club and go find another (or start another).

But each person's pain is real pain.

I don't think dismissing someone's pain as "small" or "insignificant" or "should be called by a different name" helps them or the cause of wanting respect for all people to be the norm.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Should marginalized groups allow discussions of our rights to be derailed in the name of soothing the wounds of individuals who are not targets of systemic oppression and, in many cases, violence?

[wyld-dandelyon.livejournal.com]

I think that you should use their feelings as an opportunity to move the discussion forward in a fruitful fashion.

I certainly do not think that you should let anyone's feelings (mine, yours, or theirs) derail the discussion. And at some point,usually almost immediately after acknowledging their feelings, you need to say something like, "Imagine what it would be like if it wasn't just the [specificfandom club] but all fandom clubs, all conventions, your family, your boss, and the police who were treating you this way."

People need to start somewhere, and they need their feelings heard to have that first foundation to start to understand. Then they need a structure to expand on that foundation. The foundation itself seems to be very hard to establish second-hand; people seem to need some personal experience, their own or a loved-one's, to obtain a foundation stone.

Happily, once that foundation is in place, most people have empathy enough to hear the stories of other people and care about them.

It's tedious, to do this with person after person, all your life, though!

[http://users.livejournal.com/peasant_/]

Word.

It's annoying to have to do, but every time one of these situations comes up we have to make a decision between choosing to teach and choosing to express our own anger and desire to have our feelings heard. And I feel that most times we have a responsibility to teach, otherwise we risk doing so much damage with an individual who was probably on the cusp of really understanding. Besides, personally I find the teaching so much more rewarding and pleasant than something that inevitably descends into an argument.

[wyld-dandelyon.livejournal.com]

One of the things that led to what my sister said was a "miraculous" change in my skills in communicating when angry was the realization that, although sometimes you need volume to be heard (when it's necessary to convince someone that what you're saying is important enough to stop and listen), most of the time, yelling loudly only makes people feel attacked and get defensive -- and that ends your chance to actually have your feelings heard, in the sense of listened to and thought about and, at least some of the time, understood.

When someone not only has my words fall on their eardrums, but echo in their mind, so they see some part of the world differently, that is when I feel most strongly that my feelings were heard.

And you're right. It is rewarding.

Though it is much harder to do than merely making the doors and windows rattle!

[http://users.livejournal.com/peasant_/]

I've come to realise it's also important to remember we are all coming at these problems from very different background communities. A style of approach that may be entirely appropriate in one community would be wildly destructive in another and vice-versa. I know how to negotiate my own individuality in my own community, but when I come to LJ and meet people from so many different backgrounds, with different experiences and expectations to draw on, my style is very much in a minority. And while I know that if a lot of the activists on LJ ever came to my community and started using the approach they use here - well I would run them out of town on a rail myself because they would do harm in ten minutes that would take ten years to put right. But here? Well this place is very different, and who knows, maybe their style is appropriate and useful here.

[wyld-dandelyon.livejournal.com]

Oh, very true.

And LJ isn't just one place. Each separate journal is a separate place, with its own community. The host sets the tone, to a significant degree, even if they don't avail themselves of screening comments and other such community-management tools.

Of course, the various LJ journals' communities do overlap, to a greater or lesser degree.

[lilachigh.livejournal.com]

this is so true, but I was at the panel and I think most of them said they were not there to educate anyone, they were weary of educating people, people should work it out for themselves, do the hard graft in order to understand. I think I had the same problem with my chemistry teacher!

[rusty_halo.livejournal.com]

By telling you that injustice happens in our communities and that you have a responsibility to educate yourself about it, they were educating you.

[lian-li.livejournal.com]

wait, are you seriously saying that people have a duty to sacrifice their time and effort in order to further your education and understanding? Yes, it is a failure in a *paid professional*, like your chemistry teacher. Anyone not a paid professional? Doesn't owe you a thing. This comparison is hair-raising.

I'm sorry for being so confrontational, but -- it's *your* work, you're doing it for yourself. There are seriously enough ressources out there. If I misunderstood you (which is entirely possible!), I'm sorry, but I'm not sure if your realize how horribly entitled you come across :(

[wyld-dandelyon.livejournal.com]

An individual person in an individual setting OF COURSE has the right to decide if they want to teach or not.

However, if I'm in a situation where someone has asked me what it's like to be queer, I'm not thinking about whether I owe it to the person asking, or not primarily so. I'm thinking about whether talking to this person might keep one gay child from being rejected by their family, whether talking to this person might change a vote -- in other words, whether talking to this person might make the world better for me and for my community. I'm thinking that I didn't have money to send to the local LGBT center, but perhaps I have time to give to the cause.

[wyld-dandelyon.livejournal.com]

Regarding your response to lilachigh. As I understand it, Lilachigh was speaking of people on a panel at a convention, a convention Lilachigh and others had paid good money to so they could attend programming items such as this panel.

At that moment in time, the panelists were not simply private individuals living their private lives. Whether or not they were paid to be on the panel (often cons reimburse panelists' membership fees), they had agreed to speak on that topic during the panel. And every member of the audience had paid to hear them speak.

So yes, for that hour or two the panelists DID owe the people attending the panel their attention and time and knowledge and expertise, in much the same way a chemistry teacher owes the students who paid the school so they could take the class.

Certainly it is fair for part of that teaching to be that in a normal day-to-day setting, people should not simply demand someone's time, that it is very rude to do so.

But it IS fair to assume that if someone has agreed to speak, even if only for an hour, then they do have an obligation to teach during that hour. Especially if you paid money to hear them.

[lilachigh.livejournal.com]

If these had been people sitting talking privately, then yes, they are quite entitled to say they don't have to explain things to me. But these were on a panel offered to people attending a conference! A panel I was attending to learn and educate myself as to their experiences and points of view.

Admittedly I mistakenly thought we were going to be talking about how to deal with those problems when writing fiction, but once I realised they were tackling things from a different aspect, I was still keen to listen because it was interesting and I was learning things I hadn't known before.

Do they have a "duty" to sacrifice their time and effort to educate me? No, of course not. But on the other hand do I have a "duty" to sacrifice my time and effort to listen to them talking about the horrendous difficulties they have experienced in their lives? No, of course I don't. A road doesn't just run from A to B, it goes from B to A as well.

[wyld-dandelyon.livejournal.com]

OK, so these people had agreed to be on a panel to discuss this topic, for a bunch of strangers that had paid good money for the right to hear them talk, and who took an hour or two of their time to listen to the panelists.

Um, I do panels at conventions.

When you agree to be on a panel, you agree, at a minimum, to spending that hour or two hours on the topic of the panel, sharing your experiences, wisdom, or hard-earned knowledge with the people sitting in the chairs in front of you. Many panelists prepare ahead of time, doing research, preparing presentations, and the like in addition to that hour or two.

If you are unwilling to spend that hour educating people on the topic, you have no business agreeing to be on the panel! Those people paid money to hear you!

[lilachigh.livejournal.com]

Thank you! You have put my point of view on this part of the problem far more clearly than I could!

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

What is our responsibility as students in these situations when we are not members of the marginalized group?

[http://users.livejournal.com/peasant_/]

I'd say pretty much the same as the responsibilities of the marginalised group - do everything you can to foster a polite conversation. So listen as much as you talk or ask questions, take the time to calm down if you get angry or walk away if you can't. But don't think you have nothing to contribute either, a dialogue requires input from both sides and if you aren't marginalised you probably know more about what causes the prejudice in the first place, and hence have ideas about how to fight it. If we're actually going to solve the problems (as opposed to just venting about our own woes, which is a different thing) we need to hear that information.

At the moment on LJ the biggest problem seems to be that what should be a discussion has become a territorial fight over who gets to talk at all and what they are allowed to say. That is making matters worse not better. So someone like yourself who is influential enough to attract the attention of Metafandom when you speak has something of a responsibility to try to think of ways to break the deadlock. At the moment there are a lot of people being excluded from the conversation because they are scared or upset or quite frankly came to LJ to get away from their problems not have another fight about them. This is true of both marginalised and unmarginalised folk. IMO what needs to happen is for the conversation to be reset to a gentler, more inclusive dialogue instead of people trying to impose their opinions on others and getting cross when they inevitably fail. I don't have the people skills to know exactly how that should be done, but if the movers and shakers amongst the social justice activists don't get together and work out a way to do it then I can't see us getting past the current semi-continuous wank for a very long time. And that, I'm sure you will agree, will be a great shame.

[dharma-slut.livejournal.com]

I find this to be true as well. I see very often people who have listened to someone's experiences will try to find correlations within their own experiences. They will want to voice that correlation either in a bid for validation or else to show empathy.


Sometimes easier to notice the attempt in hindsight, after I've shouted them down...

[wyld-dandelyon.livejournal.com]

Yes!

Or trying to voice that correlation to show that they did listen and think about what you said, that it didn't just go in one ear and out the other, but that your experiences touched them. That your experiences are becoming real to them, and that they matter.

I think that this is how people start to "put themselves in someone else's shoes". They need a starting place that is real to them, and nothing's more real than your own experience, especially your own pain.

Once they have a starting place, then they can start to understand the ways that the shoes are different.

[wyld-dandelyon.livejournal.com]

It occurs to me that in being bi, I have gotten to have pretty much the same experiences in the larger society and in the microcosm of queer-friendly places like the LGBT center, and to hear about them from other bi people as well.

To me, they feel very much the same, both in the moment, while they are happening and, when hearing about them from friends, they sound very much the same. The same words are used.

Being Pagan in a Christian world is another part of my experience. The experience of being a minority, and one that is alternatively laughed at and denounced, feels very much the same as having similar behavior directed toward me because I'm bi or toward my sweetie, because she's very obviously transgendered.

And it feels very similar to how I felt when I faced overt sexism from teachers, alumni, as a member of one of the early classes that included women at the University of Notre Dame.

Of course, there are differences, important differences, very significant differences when looked at intellectually. And I think it is very important to acknowledge those differences, for at least two reasons -- one is that for someone else, one or more of those differences may be at the heart of their experience, and the other is that the differences radically affect what can be done to try to fix things.

But to me, all these things feel more similar than the sounds of my two steel-string acoustic guitars.

But maybe these experiences, especially the experiences of being bi in both of the monosexual worlds, is why I have come to so automatically try to see if there is some core of truth when someone in a majority says they feel oppressed or marginalized, or for the first time in their lives, part of a minority.

That and the fact that I have found that when someone in a majority starts to understand what it is like to feel oppressed and marginalized, if approached in a way that doesn't make them afraid or defensive, they can become allies, or at least more like allies than they were before.

(edited to fix html coding)

[newsbean.livejournal.com]

I think that what you've said makes it a good teaching moment. To point out to someone that they are feeling marginalized for the first time and to take and extrapolate that to how some people are made to feel *all* the time. But that doesn't mean that a one to one equation is valid.

Feeling marginalized in a gathering of 140 people can open your eyes, but if you take that and start complaining about how you're feeling marginalized you're not learning the lesson and you should be called on it.

[wyld-dandelyon.livejournal.com]

Yes! This!

But how you're called on it makes a huge difference. If you feel attacked, you will probably not learn anything. You'll be too busy defending yourself.

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

Okay, I wasn't going to say anything on this post, but...who the hell are the people kicking other people out of fandom for being thirtysomething and having a kid? Where is this happening? I mean, I'm not going to say "I haven't seen it so it must not exist," but at the same time I cannot believe there are communities out there where this is a serious issue. I mean, sometimes I feel like a space alien when half my flist is talking about college issues or trying to get into grad school, but that's my issue, not theirs, you know?

[wyld-dandelyon.livejournal.com]

My kid is now 16, and anything her Mom does is uncool, so I don't get child-related flack at cons any more. My immediate social group never did this; I know the attitude exists in some pockets of fandom primarily from overheard snarky comments. You would have to ask the poster who mentioned this to find out where it's happening right now.

[elspethdixon.livejournal.com]

the hell are the people kicking other people out of fandom for being thirtysomething and having a kid? Where is this happening?

I saw it recently in comics fandom, where someone was ranting at length on fandom!secrets about how nobody should ever bring children to comic con because OMG, when you have kids, your life should stop (with a bonus segue into how she/he wished pregnant women would just stay home because they "made her uncomfortable"). But that's about the only time I can remember seeing an outright attempt to exclude people with children from fannish activities.

Of course, I have no kids, so it's possible that it happens all the time and I just don't notice.

Whn it comes to age, I'd say that negativity and the attitude that someone doesn't belong in fandom are far more likely to be directed at teenagers who are underage and often get excluded from spaces for legal reasons and at fans who are middle-aged or older then at relatively young 30-somethings (i.e. why are you writing NC-17 fic? You're a post-menopausal woman -- clearly you shouldn't get to have a sexuality anymore).