Readercon

I'll be attending Readercon this weekend in Burlington, Mass., along with numerous other Aqueductistas, including one of this year's Guests of Honor, Andrea Hairston. It's a safe bet that with so many Aqueductistas present, there'll be a plenitude of stimulation and challenge on tap. My own programming is:

Friday July 11 11:00 AM    F    Empathy, Identification, and Stories . L. Timmel Duchamp (moderator), Andrea Hairston, Matthew Kressel, Julia Rios, Walt Williams. At a panel at Arisia 2013, Andrea Hairston said, "I can only tell you a story if you're a human who can hear a story and imagine what it's like to be someone who isn't you." Tannanarive Due added that access to stories matters: some children, for instance, can easily find books about characters like themselves, while others have to read books from outside a position of identification. Culture creates structures of identification and empathy; or, to put it another way, ways of feeling from within and ways of feeling from without. How do stories create structures of feeling, and how can writers and readers both benefit from awareness of these structures?

Friday July 11 12:30 PM    ENV    L. Timmel Duchamp reads from a novel in progress

Saturday, July 12 1:00 PM    G    Audience-centric Narratives . Judith Berman, L. Timmel Duchamp (leader), Chris Gerwel, Ken Houghton, James Patrick Kelly. Several subgenres of speculative fiction, such as horror, satire, and slipstream, focus on creating a particular feeling or experience within the reader, rather than on the more typical plot-driver of a protagonist's inner or outer conflicts. The failure mode of this sort of writing is manipulation and didacticism. What makes an audience-centric story successful, from the author's point of view and the reader's?

Aqueduct won't be in the Dealers Room, and I haven't scheduled an autograph session, but I'll be available for conversation and book-signing throughout. See you there!

Funny uncles

Sunday I told an old friend my family's multi-generational saga of rape and incest.  Most of it, anyway.  Into her silence at the end I asked, "Aren't all families like that?"

"No," she replied.  "No, they're not."  But I think our science fiction family might be.  At least a little.

The incident that my assertion above will bring immediately to mind for you depends on when you're reading this.  At the time I'm writing it, that's most likely the sexual harassment a congoer underwent at Readercon.  It wasn't the first incident of its kind.  It won't be the last.

I met the Readercon offender when he served as MC for the Carl Brandon Society Awards ceremony at Arisia in 2011.  I'm not shocked that he's someone I know.  That's how this sort of thing works.

The encounters that affront me are more often racial or cultural in nature than sexual.  And the people that hurt me, that stun me with their ignorance and blithe insensitivity, their privileged cluelessness, are my friends, my role models, my elders.  My tribe.

Here are two names.

Statement by Readercon's ConCom

In the wake of the mass resignation of Readercon's Board, Readercon's ConCom has issued a statement vis-a-vis the Readercon Board's handling of the sexual harassment issue, overriding the Board's decision by permanently banning Rene Walling from attending. The ConCom also apologizes to Genevieve Valentine and Kate Kligman and notes:

by damaging the convention's reputation as a safe haven where harassment is aggressively discouraged and appropriately dealt with when it happens, we have upset many people who care about the convention and undermined our efforts to make the convention more inclusive and diverse. Women, members of minority groups, and younger people are often especially vulnerable to harassment, and many have been understandably put off by the perception that harassment is tolerated at our convention; we cannot claim to be welcoming them while creating an environment in which they feel unsafe.

We offer our heartfelt apology to everyone in our community who trusted us and has been hurt by our breach of trust; to everyone who once felt safe at Readercon and no longer does; to those who have linked Readercon's reputation with their own and now feel tarnished by association, especially our past guests of honor and anyone who has officially or informally promoted the convention; and to those who love Readercon and are heartbroken to see its leaders acting contrary to the convention's best interests.

The statement also promises to take future specified actions to address the general problem of sexual harassment. If Readercon implements all the steps they are proposing, that con will be a trail-blazer in the way WisCon has come to be. 

Panel deportment and demeanor

It occurred to me, particularly after reading Nancy Jane Moore's comment on my Post Readercon report, that for most of us, signing up for and appearing on panels usually entails only a limited amount of reflection. Would it be correct to say that the only thing most people who sign up for particular panels are sure of is that they have (or might have) something to say about the proposed topic? And that that certainty is the only criterion they have for participation? And is it also true that most people sit down in front of an audience first and foremost with the purpose of talking on that subject and with the confidence (whether warranted or not) that the audience (if not the other panelists) will be interested in hearing them speak?

Speaking to the subject of the panel is, after all, what they as panelists are there to do. But it's not really just that simple, is it. Panelists are there to engage in a collective communication-- with fellow panelists, and with the audience (even when the audience isn't speaking). When you start to think about it, it's a difficult form of communication to describe. Unless, of course, you think of each panelist as present in isolation from all the others, relating singly to the audience. But what sort of experience would that be for the audience? Three or four or five different speakers, performing intermittently, like university lecturers taking turns addressing a class of students? That's not my idea of a panel.

Presuming that's not a correct description of what a panel is, let's ask ourselves just what the appropriate description for the kind of communication that panelists should be engaging in is. Andrea Hairston, in her second comment to the post, used the word "conversation." When I'm moderating a panel, I definitely think of the discussion as a conversation-- among panelists, and between the audience and the entire panel. The character of a panel discussion is significantly different when audience participation is allowed or encouraged early in the panel rather than late. (I've moderated both kinds of panels, and both are legitimate, since verbal participation by the audience, while usually desirable, is not always necessary for creating a worthwhile experience for all.) Since Readercon panels last for only 50 minutes (as opposed to WisCon's eighty minutes), it's not surprising that quite a few panels at Readercon don't allow the audience into the conversation until very near the end (if at all). This is always fine with me, as an audience member, if the panelists have interesting things to say and are engaging in genuine conversation (rather than holding forth to the audience without bothering to engage with one another).

Did you catch that I just used the expression "holding forth"? I'm sure that just about everyone reading this post will know what I mean. The problem with seeing one's purpose on a panel as primarily that of speaking--"sharing" insights or regurgitating something recently read that relates to the subject--is that it turns panelists into lecturers. Speaking for myself, I've often found that the thinking, reading, and note-taking I've done in preparation for a panel may often have nothing to do with what the other panelists are talking about. So what does a responsible panelist do? Wait one's turn and hold forth? Many do. But that's not my idea of participating in a discussion. Even when I'm the moderator of the panel, I try to take my cue from the other panelists--and sometimes the audience-- and am prepared, when necessary, to abandon my preparation and go with the flow. (I.e., as a moderator or leader of a panel, my priority is to foster and organize as best I can an engaged discussion, a priority above that of setting an agenda for the discussion. I do, of course, start out setting an agenda, particularly when it's a panel I've proposed myself, but I'm always prepared to abandon it when I can see its either unintelligible or uninteresting to the other panelists.)

There are some problems, though, in thinking of panel discussion as conversation. A panel discussion can actually become too casual and informal, encouraging certain types of people to blather on uninhibited in ways that in a more informal setting could easily be headed off by the speaker's interlocutors. Informality can encourage a loss of consciousness that you're demanding attention from a large group of people who have no way of using the usual gambits interlocutors can use in conversations involving less than, say, six people. Informality can also contribute to panelists ignoring the cues of the moderator. Even worse, I've seen panelists actually lose it when stopped mid-flow--completely oblivious to the fact that the tangent they've gone off on may not be of interest to anyone else in the room. When there's an audience, cutting off someone whose gone on and on and on can be fraught, even if everyone else in the room is just waiting for that person to stop.

Would it be unreasonable to suggest that people ought not to agree to be on a panel unless at least one or two of the other panelists are people they're interested in hearing talk and interested in engaging with? It might well be that mere interest in and knowledgeability about the topic are not  sufficient reasons for being on a panel. (They are obviously necessary reasons.) Perhaps all of us who participate in programming need to have the sense, going into a panel, that we're interested in hearing what the other panelists (or most of the other panelists) will have to say.

I strikes me that when serving on a panel we need to start from an attitude of respect for the panelists (and audience--which is something good writers will presumably already have, since you can't really be a good writer without presuming your readers are smart and perceptive), and a desire to hear what they're going to say, and of course the hope that the other panelists will be as interested in engaging with what you have to say as you are with what they have to say.

Does that sound utopian? I don't really think it is, since I've seen the difference these attitudes can make to panels I've been on. (The Imagining Radical Democracy panel at the last WisCon was a perfect example of that. I found it an electrifying experience. And I was not alone in that.) I feel pretty confident that much of the insensitive behavior of panelists at cons is a result of a particular panelist coming into the panel with a predetermined lack of interest in what the other panelists might have to say and regarding all the time on the panel when they're not talking as wasted, boring moments to be waited out.

WisCon-- and probably many other cons as well-- offers guidelines (and even a little course) on effective moderation of panels. Everyone considers panel behavior to be obvious. I wonder. Perhaps we ought to have a primer for prospective panelists. Not just on etiquette (though that would be a start, particularly in educating the clueless about what their relationship to the moderator ought to be), but also on purpose and attitude.    

Doing the Right Thing

I attended an intriguing panel on Sexuality and Gender in Contemporary F&SF at Readercon this past weekend. Caitlin R. Kiernan, K.A. Laity, Benjamin Rosenbaum, and Catherynne M. Valente had a lively discussion about taboos, artists and their responsibility to their audiences, and consensual artistic exchange.
The panelists spoke eloquently against “shoulds,” against telling artists what they should or should not do in their art. From the panel’s perspective, the artist is not obliged to offer role models, accepted norms, or ideas, characters, situations, actions, dialogue that the audience is comfortable with.
A few people in the audience insisted (in question form) that artists had some sort of responsibility toward the “audience” that would read/experience their work. Artists should not violate or damage that audience. Caitlin R. Kiernan claimed to have no audience in mind when creating her stories. She writes to get paid and to express the truth that comes to her. Other panelists noted that the audience doesn’t have to read a book that offends them. The audience is not forced to take in an artist’s work. Works of art can be labeled, tagged, or come with warnings to aid readers in finding what they want or avoiding what they aren’t up for.

I think people talking about the artists’ responsibility to the audience were trying to figure out how to undo the damage and violence of patriarchal and colonialist narratives. How do we transform the harsh past/present of negative representation, discrimination, and exploitation based on figments of our collective imagination such as gender and race? Popular mainstream culture has not done justice by all of us. On-going anxiety over how to deal with this results in calls for artists to Do The Right Thing and save us all!

Along those lines—
As I revised my paper critiquing District 9, Nnedi Okorafor, Nigerian author of Who Fears Death, was being chastised and badgered, live and on online, to cease and desist her speculative engagement with African narratives. See Nnedi's Blog.
The logic of this and similar attacks goes like this. Given all the savage imagery, disinformation, and stereotypical refuse clogging up our minds and spirits, Nnedi and other African (or Indigenous, Asian, African American, et. al.) writers should stick to mimetic realism to set the record straight and “uplift the race.” They should also hold off critiquing woman-hating practices, such as female genital cutting/mutilation in Africa, least they contribute to the savage imagery that oppresses colored people.

Women writers are policed for doing dirty laundry in public—an interestingly domestic metaphor for exposing women hating traditions. Colored people are not yet ready for SF&F meta-literature. Look at say District 9! What good does SF&F do us? To the frequent challenge, “What good is science fiction to Black people?” which implicitly demanded a justification for abandoning realism and the honorable labor of racial uplift, Octavia Butler replied: What good is any form of literature to Black people?
Despite apparent similarity, critiquing the stereotypical representations of Nigerians in D-9 is not the same as demanding narrative maid service in the form of mimetic realism. Nigerian writers need not spend their time, their creativity simply reacting to colonial narratives, setting the record straight, cleaning up the mess that has been done to their image. No artists need to be doing maid service. Nnedi certainly doesn't need to be in a constant reactive state to deal with the representational juggernauts trying to wipe her. However, offering complex aesthetic experiences that transform the narrative landscape as Nnedi does, is invaluable.
To Do The Right Thing--we need more stories, not more “shoulds.”

Readercon, authority, and models of readership

[Cross-posted from my blog, where the discussion in the comments may be of interest.]

This weekend I went to my first Readercon. There's a lot to like about Readercon, but there's also a lot to dislike. To start off with, the name is false advertising. This isn't a con that centers itself on or meets the needs of readers, or enables readers to talk to each other. This is a professional networking conference that also meets the needs of a small set of fans, most of whom seem to be white, male, and over 50. It is designed, in many ways large and small, to reinforce the status of professionals--particularly writers, but also editors, paid critics, and academics--above that of people who are "just fans" or "just readers."

The con's setup (everything from the programming to the hotel selection) allows and encourages this group of people to talk to each other, and fans and readers to express appreciation to this set of authorities, but does very little to encourage literary conversation as a conversation among equals. Readership, audience reaction, is strongly encouraged to stay within strict bounds; criticism and participation in the discussion are treated as privileges accorded to a few, not the basic rights of every reader.

This description is probably startling to many of you, since many attendees praise the con for the high level of its discussion. Indeed, many of the panels are a joy -- panelists tend to be intelligent, erudite, and witty, with a deep knowledge of the panel topics. The problem is, they all tend to have the same kind of deep knowledge. There are a number of perspectives which simply do not appear--particularly those of people of color, but also those of younger generations, queer people, women, young professionals, poor or working class people, and fields of literary criticism developed since 1968. (HINT: Harold Bloom, b. 1930, most influential work The Anxiety of Influence [1972], should not be the youngest nongenre literary critic anyone on a panel can cite.) The con is missing out on a huge richness of diversity of experience and thought; it is missing out on some of the greatest pleasures of reading, not to mention the chance for writers and critics and "just readers" to challenge and change each other.

These lacks are not due to individual program participants, who seem in general eager to talk and welcoming to newcomers. Rather, they stem from basic assumptions shaping the con's programming practices.

Programming
Programming consists of two tracks of panel discussions, two tracks of readings, two tracks of workshops, individual discussion, and "special panels," one track of kaffeeklatsches, and one track devoted to autograph sessions of two to three authors. Program items are developed and assigned by the con staff in private. Panel discussions usually consist of four to six panelists discussing the program topic for forty-five minutes to an hour, with the remainder of the hour open to audience questions at the moderator's discretion. Kaffeklatsches are small meetings led by one or two hosts, and the topic and management of the space is up to the host's discretion.

Basically, all of this creates a top-down expert approach to literature and literary discussion, emphasizing authoritarianism, lecturing, and celebrity status, discouraging small or individual book conversations among people who are not panelists. A small group of experts is given dedicated time and space to speak; the mass of readers must speak in a conversation framed by the experts, and all discussion is mediated by the experts, rather than being reader-to-reader. Kaffeeklatsches may offer a space for reader-to-reader discussion, depending on how the host shapes conversation, but these are not even on dedicated topics; the audience may be brought together by their interest in a particular writer, but since that writer is the host who controls the conversation, the conversation can only occur in particular ways, even if the writing is the topic--and frequently it is not, nor supposed to be.

Of course people can form small discussion groups on their own, if they can hold a steady discussion in the public hallways, or have a hotel room they are willing to open up to strangers -- and I think we all know that depth and long duration are not typical of con encounters in hallways. My point is not that readers are mute or lack initiative, but that the con provides dedicated spaces and established methods for particular kinds of conversations, but not for others.

Additionally, the con provides no resources or dedicated programming for newbies. For a population that often claims to be welcoming the socially mal-adept, it's striking how little care is taken to ease new people into the community discussion. Or, rather, it's striking what kinds of new people are eased in. People who have trouble reading social cues but are confident enough to speak and volunteer discussion without explicit welcome may find this experience pleasurable. People who are hesitant to volunteer discussion without being explicitly welcomed, or who are reluctant to intrude on conversations without explicit invitation, will not. And these differences, although individual, are both gendered, racialized, and tend to trend according to age.

The scheduling shows both an indifference to the needs of typical young working attendees and to encouraging non-panelist communication. Readercon takes place the weekend after a holiday weekend, when people without organizational power (who tend to be younger) will be reluctant or unable to take the day off, but eleven of the con's 21.5 hours of programming are scheduled for Friday. Saturday and Sunday contain some rerun programming (items repeated from earlier Readercons), while the Friday programming is all new. Key program items, like the panel on the work of GOH Elizabeth Hand, took place in the middle of a workday. The kaffeeklatsch with GOH Greer Gilman took place at 11am, first thing in the morning, on a workday. The race panel, which could be expected to be difficult and controversial, took place at Friday at 5pm, meaning that anyone who could only attend the con after work could not make this programming item.

Only one mealtime during the con is scheduled for the entire con, removing another opportunity for people to mingle. There are no official parties and no official Saturday evening events that encourage mingling. The "Meet the Prose" party on Friday evening once again centers on having readers communicate with writers rather than each other, and also offers a painfully evident demonstration of relative status within the Readercon community: You can tell who's generally considered important by how stationary they are.

Unsurprisingly, given the con's focus on traditional status markers, panels are dominated by white people, men, and people over forty. Women, younger attendees, and people of color led the readings track much more than in the panel discussions. POC hardly appeared as panelists outside the dedicated race discussion. I am not convinced more than two people under 30 would have been on the panels without the intervention of GoH Greer Gilman, who had clearly encouraged and endorsed the participation of several young female academics and writers in several program items. Despite the heavy female presence at the con (three female Guests of Honor, including the Memorial GoH; an attendee base that I'd guesstimate at 40-50% female), programming showed a disturbing trend to gender segregation: in panels of 4-6 people, many panels were all one gender or had only one male or female participant out of all the panelists.

For me, the cap for the con's evident unconcern for people who do not fit a narrow set of criteria came in the advertisement for Readercon 21 in the printed Program Guide to the con, which has the tagline "This IS your father's Readercon." Yes, I am familiar with the phrase's history. This does not eliminate the sexism of the assumption that genders science fiction and science fiction conventions male (it was "your father's Oldsmobile" because it was assumed men had the money, the purchasing power, and the moral right to make unilateral decisions about the household's major purchases). And it relies on the idea that what the Concom values in Readercon is the golden past, that it wants to contract rather than expand.

The result of all this, quite clearly, is the reluctance of people under forty to come to the con without the additional impetus of professional networking. In a con taking place in the city with the youngest age distribution in the United States because of the concentration of colleges in the area, I did not meet a single person under thirty who was there without some professional reason to be (academic, editor, professional critic, writer or aspiring writer); in fact, I only know of three people under forty, including myself, who were there without some professional reason. People of color are especially unlikely to attend without professional obligation, given the overwhelming whiteness of the con and the unthinking cultural imperialism of many of the panels.

Race
People of color at the con: 8-12 (personal count vs. personal count of friends)
Con attendees: 600 (guesstimate based on discussion with other attendees)
Percentage of people of color at the con: 1-2%

This con is 98% white. The United States is 66% or 74% white (depending on whether white Latinos are included). Boston is 58% white.

Accessibility
This is the worst con I've ever seen for accessibility; no one appeared to have given it any thought at all. The signage for rooms was small, poorly formatted, and difficult to read even for someone without major vision problems (or, to be precise, for someone with artificially corrected vision problems). The pocket program font size is nearly illegible. The aisles in panel rooms may have been large enough for wheelchairs, but only barely. I believe there was no ramp access to the panel podiums, but may be wrong on this. The steps up and down to the podiums were clearly difficult for at least some of the panelists. There were no seats or spaces up front set aside for wheelchairs or people with vision or hearing problems.

Miscellaneous

1. The hotel not only didn't have free wireless, it had thirteen-dollar-a-day wireless that did not work for a substantial number of people. It is just plain ridiculous that the hotel charged for this to begin with, or that the con failed to set up a network themselves for attendees in this situation.
   
2. The lack of official party space means that people run parties out of their rooms, inconveniencing guests who do not keep those hours. Admitting that people at cons have parties and declare some dedicated space for them in a single floor or wing will make things easier on everyone, including people who want to sleep on quiet floors.
   
3. The program guide devotes an entire page to defining science fiction awards (which attendees probably either know or can google) and devotes 37 pages to participant bios, largely because no one seems to have spent any effort imposing length limits. Some of the bios are five paragraphs long.
   

I'll try to get up something on alternative discussion models tomorrow, but I'd like to separate it out because it's a general sf con issue even if Readercon is a particularly extreme example. Even the smaller sf cons seem dead-set on the panel discussion model. I don't honestly see Readercon as likely to change its practices, but I think there's some stuff we can experiment with at Wiscon.