Reflections on "Narrative and Politics"

After the panel ended, I went straight up to PALWICK and tried to reassure her that her parable had been perfectly comprehensible –she’s recounted that here. I said of the Confronter, “How could she have completely ignored the fact that your Delany story was about class resentment?” PALWICK replied that for someone so focused on race, it was possible to be blind to arguments about class; indeed, looking at the Confronter’s blog, I find that she has some generous comments about race and astute thoughts on gender but tends to elide class issues and to be very immersed in the broadcast media –for example, she completely buys the press’s denunciation of Obama’s “bitter rural white Americans” remark. PALWICK pointed out that it was particularly odd to immediately associate a black man/white woman conflict with the current election, as such issues have been in the news since at least 1870.

As I said at the panel, there’s a lot of provocative stuff that I wunna comment on.

The Delany quote is vintage Delany and indeed makes its point beautifully; it’s a point that both Delany and DUCHAMP have made in different forms over time. And three of the panelists offered astute responses to DUCHAMP’s question. PALWICK, however, balked, for reasons I completely sympathize with, perhaps because she was the only academic as such on the panel and I too am an educator.

See, Delany is writing to an individual student about the problems with her manuscript; but DUCHAMP is presenting Delany’s insight as foundational; and to anyone who has any reservations about Delany’s generalizations, DUCHAMP’s gonna come off as though she’s saying, “Here is The Truth: how has it affected your life?” And someone who’s known Delany for a while and is very sensitive to his pedagogical shortcomings, his sometimes overbearing tone, and his aesthetic limitations may disagree with aspects of The Truth; and she’s gonna be as uncomfortable as I am with a job application that asks, “Write a four-paragraph essay on your journey to Christ.”

So PALWICK didn’t say, “Well, I have, as Bourdieu would say, twisted the stick in the other direction by disrupting certain clichés of narrative in ‘Gestella’, ‘Ever After’, ‘Stormdusk’, and ‘G.I. Jesus’, showing how the class and gender pressures of the real world mean that what our stories tell us will increase our agency and improve our status often doesn’t, and vice versa.” Instead, she tried, invoking her own longstanding knowledge of Delany's hortatory style, to deconstruct the premise that the Delany passage was The Truth for all of us. I was delighted by her response not just because I weary of Chipolatry but because it resonates with my pedagogical experience. She made three or four great points.

1. “A lot of us have grown up being taught to be very critical . . . “ This is, to my mind, of a piece with Gwyneth Jones’s criticism of Delany’s contribution to the Symposium on Women in Science Fiction. Delany’s tone is occasionally that of someone who’s just discovered oppression and has to detail it to you; and not all of us need the pedagogical style he presents to his students. I was at a Burmese restaurant four years ago with Delany and a younger African-American writer, and Delany, whose knowledge of black history has a lot of lacunae, got very intense about slavery and said to the other man, “WE WERE KEPT IN PENS!!” And the younger guy looked at him with an “I kinda already know that, Chip” expression.
   
   This is very much a generational thing: Chip and Timmi were not taught in their every humanities course to eschew racism/sexism/homophobia, whereas it’s quite possible that PALWICK was taught that way and is more interested in the problems of that approach than its virtues.


2. “telling readers or students what to think” Again, if you praise a movie or novel to Delany that he’s found homophobia or misogyny in, he will not say “What in Heaven’s name did you see in that?” He will, often, go on at length and with some intensity about his frustrations with it and cast it into the Outer Darkness. One really has to develop the assertiveness to argue against his points without his having expressed an interest in a conflicting opinion; he’ll listen if you volunteer your alternative take on the work. In the classroom, I’m told, he reins himself in; but that may not have been the case two dozen years ago when PALWICK was his student (at Clarion, alongside her friend VAN GELDER).
   
   I too am partial to other pedagogical approaches than telling students what to think: I’ll sometimes ask students to “show how a text contains or achieves x”; but often I’ll offer propositions or themes and ask the class what it thinks instead. Conflicting opinions are generally valuable and educational. I had a great class last term when, in response to a student who mistakenly thought one of our texts was advocating dismissal of narratives that used stereotypes, I asked the class what role stereotypes could play in the narrative arts; and they came up with six great answers, including "Tell us something historically useful about the beliefs of the era in which they were written" and “Promote discussion of the issues at stake.”


3. Don’t discard something like Nancy Drew. Again, a generational thing. The circumstances of Delany’s and DUCHAMP’s lives mean that they’re not gonna look for liberation in The Adventures of Augie March but need something more explicitly liberatory. But you don’t have to be a Cultural Studies everything-is-counterhegemonic putz to enjoy the flashes of transgression in . . . here, let me quote my dissertation:

   two factors delayed the discovery of Highsmith, Dick and Thompson: the habit of viewing the Fifties as a conservative wasteland and the fact that the most energetic rediscovery and recuperation of authors was taking place as part of the battle against racism, sexism, and homophobia. A vast amount of energy had to be devoted to refuting Mortimer Adler’s claim that there were no great black authors before 1955 and William Henry’s insistence that the canon could be purged of women with little ill effect. Novels that contained villains who could be seen as stereotypically gay, novels that in some way partook of their era’s misogyny, and novels that presented black characters as adjuncts to a white protagonist’s struggle may not have been priorities2. Only recently, with feminist, homophilic, and antiracist ideas having gained a toehold in some academic and journalistic circles, has it become possible to relinquish our excessive vigilance and implement Raymond Williams’s insight that “it would be wrong to overlook the importance of works and ideas which, while clearly affected by hegemonic limits and pressures, are at least in part significant breaks beyond them” (Marxism 114).

   In other words – and DUCHAMP made this point (in different words) later in the panel as well as at her GoH speech – not everyone will have the energy to dig deep into the nostril of hegemony for the booger of subversion.

Instead of following up on PALWICK’s challenge, DUCHAMP –suffering, I would guess, from Tired Moderator Syndrome as most panel chairs were by Sunday- seems to have gotten (and stayed) mad at her for not playing the game. So she tried to defend Chip Delany, of all people, against the charge of dismissing potentially useful or healing stories. My read of PALWICK’s response was that it was the parable that first came to her mind to challenge Chipolatry and show that Delany was not always The Great Repository of Progressive Thought.

The parable didn’t work as an argument because of the way, as GUNN later observed, PALWICK was “emotionally involved in” it: whereas my notes say "Chip once said 'I'm more marginalized than you are' to a poor female grad student," those members of the audience who were not attuned to how an impoverished grad student striking for benefits would have lived heard a white professional saying, "A black man pissed me off by complaining about his oppression" rather than "A rich and famous aristocrat ignored my suffering to focus on his own."

It might have worked, for example, if PALWICK had said, "The kind of thinking that Chip's convictions lead to is what leads him to dismiss Toni Morrison's work, work which I, and many others, find very valuable." But the emotion in the parable she used was not hostility toward Chip so much as toward the reverence for his words that mention of his name was expected to generate. I’d had an analogous experience the previous day: I’d said to a woman, “I remember Timmi having told me blah blah blah,” and she’d replied, “Timmi can’t have told you that because it’s not true”; my impulse was immediately to recount Three Occasions on Which Timmi’d Been Mistaken; but my interlocutor didn’t want to hear about them.

MURPHY’s remarks from Heilbrun about “what has been forbidden to women” meshed wonderfully with DUCHAMP’s Alice Sheldon quote from the previous day and the “Thinking Ahead” panel’s discussion of Clinton from Friday.

GILMAN and GUNN’s conflicting characterization of whether our society pressures us to progress or to stay in our place and be like our parents is, of course, a class conflict.

DUCHAMP and PALWICK’s disagreement on therapeutic narrative echoed a conversation between Eric R. Marcus, Chuck Anderson, and Dominick LaCapra at the Columbia Narrative Medicine conference of 2003. Anderson, like PALWICK, was talking about how narrative could empower patients and indeed get their doctors to perceive them as human beings with agency and lives; others worried, based on the academic norms they’d learned regarding hegemonic stories, whether one risked turning a patient’s or a med student’s story into a “sutured narrative” that could close down the story and absorb all problems.

Now, I worry about artists who are dazzled by the aura of someone who teaches at a university –I wish Tony Kushner, for example, saw that he doesn’t have to quote Harold Bloom with such reverence; he’s probably smarter than Harold about many important things. So I was very pleased when, in response to that huge generalization DUCHAMP cited Peter Brooks as having made, PALWICK invoked Richard Wright (in a very Nussbaumian way, interestingly) to point out that there is such a thing in the canon as Protest Fiction, you know.

As to PALWICK's invocation of Thomas Covenant and Frodo as protagonists with power whose sovereignty is not exalted --I wouldn’t wish Stephen R. Donaldson’s prose on my worst enemies, but stories of the renunciation of power, from Cervantes (Sancho Panza’s abdication) to Neil Gaiman (Destruction’s abdication) are very important. Still, they don’t offer most of us identificatory characters, as we generally don’t have that level of power to relinquish.

Now, I began to wish that DUCHAMP had opened with a quote from Charles Baxter instead of Delany, because he’s written so well of the perils of therapeutic narrative; and therapeutic narrative kept coming up. I got the impression that MURPHY’s composition of “Before and After” was therapeutic for her; and of course, GUNN told an extremely therapeutic story that defies a whole bunch of counterhegemonic dogmas. Low-status female author in a dither calls up a high-status male and he gives her exactly the right advice? Shows how a great healing story can violate those dogmas, which was a point PALWICK was trying to make from the start. Anna Mollow, in a paper I described toward the end of my “Black Disability Studies” article, demonstrated the same point on a bigger scale: Willow Weep for Me is ableist crap by Disability Movement standards, but a brave act of rebellion in African-American culture (Looking at my notebook, I find I wrote in the margins that very day, “PALWICK’s point is really Anna Mollow’s: don’t get hidebound by dogmas and reject or ignore other people’s experience”). Again, class differences play a big role too.

GILMAN’s remark on what “tends to stress the personal and private and project it onto the public and collective” really deserved elucidation. She was talking about yente journalism, I think; but the change from “the personal is political” to the culture of therapy needs to be fleshed out, lest people keep blaming the latter on the former.

Last Night's Reading

I'm happy to report that Nisi Shawl's reading at University Bookstore brought out more than fifty people, and Tom had to provide the bookstore with an additional ten copies of Filter House (that we brought along just in case) when the bookstore's display stack sold out. (I'm always thrilled when this happens, of course.)

Nisi read "Bird Day" and a portion of "Wallamelon." Later, a few attendees told me that they wouldn't be able to go to sleep that night until after they'd finished reading "Wallamelon." During the Q&A in a response to a question about the ease and apparent naturalness of her writing voice, Nisi informed us that she had learned only two things in college: how to roll a joint (which she admitted she hadn't done in a long time) and the importance of reading your work aloud while you're still composing it.

Art and Class

I wrote the previous post and then wondered what art produced for the seriously rich would be like.

The answer took but a minute. It would be "For the Love of God" by British artist Damien Hirst. This is a lifesize cast of a human skull done in platinum and covered with 8,601 pave-set perfect diamonds weighing a total of 1106.18 carets. According to Hirst, it cost between 10 and 15 million dollars to make. The asking price for it was 99 million dollars; and Hirst claims that it has sold to anonymous buyers for the asking price.

Narrative and Politics

The panel on Narrative and Politics sounds really interesting. I missed so much at Wiscon. Where was I? What was I doing? Clearly I should have followed Josh around.

I would like to talk more about the topic. How does class influence narrative structure? Does it? Can one talk about a working class narrative vs. and middle class or ruling class narrative? What is it like?

I used to make a distinction between mass culture and popular culture. Mass culture is created for the masses by people who do not belong to the masses: Hollywood movies is probably an example. Popular culture is created by the people: garage bands and indy rock are probably examples of this.

The two are not entirely distinct. Rock music is an industry, involving many people who are not members of the masses or the populace. But there is constant flow of new music, up from garages and basements, and a constant flow of new musicians, like peasants coming into third world cities to find work.

Where does science fiction sit? Is SF a popular art or a mass art form or both?

And how is this expressed in narrative structure?

I used to argue that there three kinds of story: the wish fulfillment fantasies about solving problems and changing the world that are so far from reality that nothing useful can be taken from them. You can't kill the boss with an enchanted sword. You can't flee the authorities on your winged horse.

The second type, often more intelligently written, is the story (ultimately) of despair. Our social problems cannot be solved. We cannot build a new world in the shill of the old. Either life is okay in a limited way, or it is dark. Either way, we are stuck with the status quo.

Focus on yourself, your problems, your own personal angst. Life is about the personal and the individual.

The first kind of story is aimed at working people. It's mind candy, though -- at least -- it admits that there is injustice and struggle in life. The second kind of story is aimed at the middle class people who maybe feel some discomfort about their jobs and lives. It says, don't try for anything better. There is nothing better.

It is (often) a story about living in a box lined with mirrors.

Finally, there are stories that question that status quo and say: community is real; society is real; injustice and struggle are real; the world can be changed. Not easily, but it can be done.

But this is message, not narrative structure.

WisCon 32 Panel 124: "Narrative and Politics"

Since originally posting them, I've added substantially to my account of "Thinking Ahead" and put a couple of "updates" on my account of "It's Not About Identity".

The next exciting panel that I attended was at 10:00 Sunday morning and featured five brilliant and experienced white women: L. Timmel Duchamp, Susan Palwick, Carolyn Ives Gilman, Pat Murphy, and Eileen Gunn. I will do my best to recount what my notes indicate: be aware that, as ever, there's lots of paraphrase and tentative recollection of details.

DUCHAMP began by reading from a set of notes that Chip Delany had sent a Creative Writing grad student a few days earlier and passed on to DUCHAMP: criticizing the student’s novel, he’d written,

I enjoyed reading your thesis very much . . . the writing is witty and beautiful. Nevertheless, there are structural realities that underlie narrative and give it its ideological weight, import, and—yes—message. You have to work with these as well. There is a path of least resistance, which, if you follow it, will make your narrative put forward the dominant hegemonic ideology:

• Men are full human beings.
• “Western” men are more completely human than “eastern” men, and more recognizably human than “eastern” men.
• Women are half-human beings.
• Women of the “East” are more completely partial (and far more satisfied with being partial) than their “Western” sisters, etc., etc.

I don’t for a moment think that is the message you want to put forward in any way, shape, or form in your writing. But this is the message we all—radical or conservative—pick up from the range of narratives around us. Now and again, one story or another will have an element that contravenes this ideology: Kingston’s Woman Warrior, Russ’s The Female Man, even Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre or Villette, or George Eliot’s Middlemarch. But though one or another of them succeeds on one front, often they fail on two or three others, and the result is the communal story that we end up taking in—the model that we all end up internalizing—is the conservative, traditional, dominant one.

That’s the one that, if we don’t fight it, intelligently and conscientiously, will take over our narratives. That is because it has always already taken over our desires and wants and aspirations. Even if we know it isn’t particularly “good for us” (whatever that means), on some level—no matter how infantile—we want Prince Charming [read: the Good Daddy] to sweep down on his flying horse and save us from the hell of unfocused confusion that is, finally, all our lives, and with a sweep of his sword put order and justice into the world that we can now live in comfortably, having put out no energy of our own. Or, we want to sweep down and, with a single grab, rescue some creature supremely helpless and unbearably beautiful who will find us dazzling and who will say, “Now, because of you, the world makes sense, and I know you are the sign of only that which is valuable in all things, for your existence itself is the sign of God’s Love and Strict Order.” Even if we have decided we definitely don’t want either role for ourselves—because, yes, we see that they cannot hold coherent before any sophisticated view of reality—the fact that we can know the story at all means we understand it and, because we understand it enough to rebel against it, means we have internalized it enough so that it is there to control our fictions at any point we are not conscientiously doing something else with them.

DUCHAMP went on to discuss three problems for the writer and to repeat the great Joanna Russ passage, “Without models, it's hard to work; without a context, difficult to evaluate; without peers, nearly impossible to speak." DUCHAMP asked the panelists, then, in that context, to discuss pitfalls that each of them had had difficulty in avoiding.

PALWICK: I love Chip Delany, and we’re old friends; but I don’t agree with any of his generalizations there. A lot of us have grown up being taught to be very critical of the type of narrative he’s talking about, both in our writing and in our reading. A lot of people who don’t like my work think it doesn’t adequately reflect that “hell of unfocused confusion” and/or aren’t comfortable with my belief in the web of small-scale benevolences that holds reality together. Now, as a teacher, I think it’s important to avoid Delany’s habit of telling readers or students what to think about a work and instead to open up the discussion and let them come up with their own reads. Look at Nancy Drew: a lot of us would think that Nancy Drew has nothing empowering or feminist to say to us; but Susan Griffin recounts the story of a little girl who saved herself from suffocation in the trunk of a car by thinking “What would Nancy Drew do in this situation?” And where would she be if we’d thrown Nancy Drew out?

DUCHAMP: But you can’t really imagine Chip Delany criticizing Nancy Drew, can you? He loves nurse novels!

PALWICK: When I was an impoverished grad student making a tenth of what he earned, Chip said to me “I’m more marginalized than you are,” thanks to my being white and his being black and gay. Now, you have to stay in touch with the place where you’ve been oppressed, but why not use it for compassion rather than for a competition of oppressions?

MURPHY: Carolyn Heilbrun in Writing a Woman’s Life said, “You can only live the stories you’ve heard, and the stories that became a part of you.” What has been forbidden to women is anger, together with the open admission of the desire for power and control; women are also forbidden to admit that their success came neither from luck nor from the kindness of others.

But in addition to the pitfalls in our writing, we see pitfalls in the world: for my latest novel, Wild Girls, one of the pitfalls in the world has been expectations –it’s a quiet story, and many reviewers respond with, “This isn’t what I expected!”

GILMAN: I write both fiction and history, and find that narrative is almost more dangerous when you’re writing the latter. Taking the path of narrative utility –that has not always been the case. We encounter cultures in which narrative is not the organizing principle: other cultures have different ways of organizing time. In a cyclical time, events never get any farther away; and people are judged not by how they change things but by how they reinforce the cycle. People who break the pattern are seen as people who’ve wasted their lives. But we are motivated and empowered by thinking of ourselves as participants in a story, which leads people into accepting fallacies, manipulation, and indoctrination.

GUNN: But there is in American life a very conservative and cyclical daily pressure to stay in your place, be like your parents—in writing fiction, that becomes the pressure to write stories like other stories. The more you break out, the more commerce and criticism will get back at you. My tactic for avoiding the repetitive narrative is to not know what I’m doing. And I don’t know if narrative is indeed more dangerous in history than in fiction –in fiction, it’s below the surface, so it may be harder to pick out the lies. Looking at drafts of my own work, I always find those normative clichés of the sort Chip warns against.

DUCHAMP: The seductions of narrative itself are dangerous.

GUNN: What entertains us is the combination of repetition and something new.

DUCHAMP: Standard narrative arcs, according to Peter Brooks, serve to exalt the sovereign subject. Do you agree, Susan?

PALWICK: I volunteer as an ER chaplain and am working on a Med School faculty to put Narrative Medicine into the curriculum, and it’s been shown that narrative helps people to heal; it helps people to get control over their lives.

DUCHAMP: But Brooks’s point is about narrative in fiction from the 18th century on?

PALWICK: We do have to be conscious of these patterns. [asks DUCHAMP to explain “exaltation of the sovereign subject”; DUCHAMP does] And this is a bad thing, why? [DUCHAMP explains the perils of voluntarism, individualism, and the denial of interconnection and structure] But it can exalt the power of community –and it can promote compassion or reflection by showing someone, not attaining sovereign power, but ground down like Bigger Thomas. [exchange about definitions]

PALWICK: Look at the example of Stephen R. Donaldson. Thomas Covenant’s job as sovereign subject, once he gains power he’s never had before, is learning to be responsible to the job in which he’s found himself. The trick politically is to see it as power with, as opposed to power over. Look at stories of heroism as the renunciation of power –the struggles of Frodo, for example: Tolkien has a more subversive side than people give him credit for. And one can learn to be a subversive reader whether the writer is subversive or not: as a reader, one can find what’s oppositional in the text.

GUNN: Well, there’s an autobiographical side to Donaldson’s novel –he’s dealing with being a rape survivor himself.

PALWICK: It helps to use narrative to reclaim your agency, to write at the top of the paper I Am The One In Control Of This Story.

GUNN: Donaldson only explained that about his own experience in response to feminist detractors.

MURPHY: Writing stories is a way of figuring out the meaning . . .

DUCHAMP: Can you think of a particular strategy that you’ve used to subvert the standard narrative arc?

MURPHY: I’m thinking about Wild Girls . . . does “Before and After” [explaining the story in question] have a narrative arc?

GUNN: Yes.

MURPHY: The narrative arc is there apart from the structure.

GUNN: But the structure is complex, with the presentation very deliberately different from the chronological sequence of events.

MURPHY: Does that structure subvert the narrative arc?

GUNN: It reinforces it.

GILMAN: You guys have just demonstrated the reader-generated side of a narrative!

GUNN: You put two events, as Forster said, or better yet, three, together, and the reader will make a story out of it.

Audience: For those of you interested in Medical Humanities, I have a few copies here of Marion McCurdy’s The Mind’s Eye: Image and Memory in Writing About Trauma. [They are quickly snatched up]

DUCHAMP: Readers must read subversively, but it helps when authors help.

GUNN: Pat is a kneejerk subversive. I try to do things with structure and expectations –I originally wrote “Fellow Americans” as all linear, a series of three different narratives, and it wasn’t working, and I called Bill Gibson, who said, “Well, I think it’s time for you to interrogate the text.” And Bill knew enough about what I’m like and how I operate that he gave me the perfect advice. He said, “Print out the story, and lock it in your file cabinet. It’s safe now, it’s unmolested, nobody will do any harm to your story. Now go to your keyboard and try something different with the bits you have.”

DUCHAMP: How does that induce the reader to read subversively?

GILMAN: It induces the reader to read interactively.

PALWICK: When my students are resistant to revision, I give them the same advice that Gibson gave Eileen.

MURPHY: I unconsciously subverted convention twice, first –as readers have pointed out to me—unwittingly reading Bilbo as female in There and Back Again . . .

DUCHAMP: Is it generating a new story out of the old one?

Audience: Is fanfic a subversion or an appropriation and misuse, or is the distinction just about the quality of the writing?

Audience: Susan, you introduced an 800-pound gorilla into the room early on that no one’s commented on, and it needs to be noted, and I’m going to be confrontational about it. In response to Timmi, you criticized Chip Delany –and that’s okay, I think more people should criticize Chip Delany –but instead of an argument, you offered a narrative that presented Delany in a negative light. It was very emotional in its response to Timmi’s analysis, and it was about his character. And you were appropriating his account of himself, and I think we’ve seen enough of this conflict of black man/white woman who’s-more-oppressed in this election!

PALWICK [Clearly shaken by the intensity of her accuser’s rage]: Well, first of all, I haven’t been following the election at all: it would make me crazy. This exchange with Chip occurred in 1994. And secondly, although I responded with narrative, it did have an analytical point, which I obviously didn’t make clear enough: it’s that in the 1990s, we were playing the more-oppressed-than-thou game, and we shouldn’t have been. Now, in terms of my telling a story about him constituting an appropriation, there is some level on which our narratives don’t belong to us.

GUNN: Susan told a story that she’s emotionally involved in rather than directly answering Timmi’s question.

PALWICK: It’s what I do. And I’m sorry if I did it clumsily, or if I was unclear, or if I raised sensitive issues; but as to having told the story, or using narrative that way –I’m not going to apologize for it.

DUCHAMP: How do we make new models for which the narratives don’t exist?

MURPHY: Carol’s got to answer that question –she does it all the time.

EMSHWILLER, in Audience: Do I? If I do, thank you.

GILMAN: This brings up the use of narrative in politics –journalists insist on imposing narratives on us, but narrative is not explanation: it stimulates explanation –once the narrative has been established, then explanations follow. But narrative promotes other fallacies –it stresses competition and conflict, as we see in the election; and it encourages the post hoc fallacy; and it tends to stress the personal and private and project it onto the public and collective . . .

PALWICK [Still smarting from having been accused of being “emotional” by an intelocutor who was herself virtually steaming with anger]: Academic jargon can suppress and marginalize emotion, which is a classic misogynist strategy . . .

DUCHAMP: I’ve been enjoying myself so much up here that I neglected to allow time for questions. Are there any? Yes, Josh?

ME: Okay, I was going to start out by saying something mean about Chip myself, but now I don’t think that’s such a good idea. Still, there’s been so much going on in this panel that I have about eight questions or ideas or connections or theses that I wish I could raise . . .

Audience: Choose one.

ME: Right. Susan, am I right that you think Chip’s advice to his student excludes too much?

PALWICK: Yes.

ME: And the prescriptions and exclusions in a piece of advice like that can leave us with too rigid a view of what's . . .

DUCHAMP: I’m sorry: we’re out of time.

ME: Okay, I’ll write up my reflections in an essay and send ‘em to Liz Henry.

DUCHAMP: Great! I keep forgetting to tell people to do that.

Idolatry at WisCon

As a preface to my forthcoming account of the "Narrative and Politics" panel, I wunna say something about Spontaneous Reverence Syndrome.

As Friday's "It's Not About Identity" panel ended and I made my way up to the front of the room to ask questions of Haran and Lacey, I blurted out, as one sometimes does, “SUZY MCKEE CHARNAS!” “Yes?” that worthy said. “I’m sorry: it’s my first time at a science fiction convention, and one does occasionally get awestruck.” “Oh,” she said, not ungently, and proceeded on her way. I did a little better with Carol Emshwiller the following day, first praising a 1961 feminist story of hers that had moved me but that I didn't remember the name of ("I hope you don't expect me to," she cautioned; turned out when I came home and looked it up that it's called "Adapted." Liz Henry too had forgotten the writing that I sought to praise her for) and then engaging her questions about what I do: we had more time together, and Emshwiller's the most patient and approachable of people one could meet. Also humble: "I feel like a little kid among the grownups," she said at one panel.

With Karen Joy Fowler (pictured behind Carol and to her right, above, and to Maureen's left, below), I was a little less successful; I had to bore her with encomia to her prose style before settling down to more substantive conversation with her about reviewers and authors. Jeanne Gomoll I didn't even try to talk with; in the case of Eleanor Arnason, my general ignorance of her achievements made her presence less imposing than it shoulda been. But it was still a big challenge to be surrounded by so many of my literary icons: as late as Monday morning, I was still saying things like "KELLY LINK!" "Um," she replied, gesturing ahead of her, "I'm going in there."

Awe, as the poet once wrote, is stultifying; and the symbolic capital with which our society endows its "celebrities" is not terribly helpful to the discourse. It's great and uplifting to compliment authors on the specifics of their work (I've done as much in the four or five fan letters I've written), but there's a great risk in being dazzled by the aura of their names. More on that anon.

A Look at the Gender-Gap in Math and Reading

The May 30 issue of Science has an article by Luigi Guiso, Ferdinando Monte, Paola Sapiezna, and Luigi Zingales titled "Culture, Gender, and Math" that analyzes the gender gaps in math and reading reported in 2003 by the Programme for International Student Assessment in relation to the state of gender equality in particular cultures. They examine the data for numerous countries and with respect to a variety of variables. Their conclusions?

These results suggest that the gender gap in math, although it historically favors boys, disappears in more gender-equal societies. The same cannot be said for how boys score in mathematics compared with how boys score in readings. Boys' scores are always higher in mathematics than in reading, and although the difference between boys' math and boys' reading scores varies across countries, it is not correlated with the GGI (The World Economic Forum's Gender Gap Index) index or with any of the other three measures of gender equality. Hence, in countries with a higher GGI index, girls close the gender gap by becoming better in both math and reading, not by closing the math gap alone. The gender gap in reading, which favors girls and is apparent in all countries, thus expands in more gender-equal societies. Similarly, although the gender gaps in all math subfields decrease in societies with more gender equality, the difference between the gender gap in geometry (where the boys' advantage relative to the girls' is the biggest) and arithmetic (where the boys' advantage relative to the girls' is the smallest) does not.

This evidence suggests that intra-gender performance differences in reading versus mathematics and in arithmetic versus geometry are not eliminated in a more gender-equal culture. By contrast, girls' underperformance in math relative to boys' is eliminated in more gender-equal cultures. In more gender-equal societies, girls perform as well as boys in mathematics and much better than them in reading. These findings shed some light on recent trends in girls' educaitonal achievements in the United States, where the math gender gap has been closing over time.

Fuzzy Gay Aliens

I just noticed that a Google search for "Fuzzy Gay Aliens" turned up no hits. That's just wrong: what if someone wants to know the name of the author who writes so movingly about fuzzy gay aliens. It seems to me that there could be scores of people wracking their brains to think of where those fuzzy gay aliens first appeared.

Once the temperature here in Philadelphia goes back down to ninety degrees, I will post more substantially. Right now, public service for people who forget names and titles is all I'm up to.

Nisi Shawl Reads Tuesday Evening in Seattle

For those living in or near Seattle:

Nisi Shawl will be reading from and signing Filter House at University Bookstore in Seattle on Tuesday, June 10, at 7 p.m. Details can be found here.



[photo by Luke McGuff]

Nisi Shawl's Filter House-- the first reviews

The first two reviews of Nisi Shawl's collection are hot off the press. Tomorrow's edition of Publishers Weekly gives it a starred review:

(Starred) Filter House Nisi Shawl. Aqueduct, $18 paper (288p) ISBN 978-1-933500-19-5 This exquisitely rendered debut collection of 11 reprints and three originals ranges into the past and future to explore identity and belief in a dazzling variety of settings. “At the Huts of Ajala,” a folktale concerning a girl wrestling with a trickster god before her birth, is full of urgent and delightful imagery, while “Wallamelon” is an elegaic, sophisticated exploration of the Blue Lady myth. Of the several science fiction stories included, the strongest are “Good Boy,” an engrossing experiment in computer psychology, African gods and postcolonial anxiety, and “Shiomah’s Land,” a cross-genre bildungsroman involving a girl who becomes the wife of a goddess. The concluding tale, “The Beads of Ku,” is an utterly arresting, authoritatively delivered tale concerning the diplomacy of marriage and the economy of the land of the dead. The threads of folklore, religious magic, family and the search for a cohesive self are woven with power and lucidity throughout this panorama of race, magic and the body.

The Seattle Times has also reviewed it in today's paper. Here's an excerpt:

Shawl, who reviews science fiction for The Seattle Times, explores a world that is both sinister and whimsical. Monsters aren't always lurking in the closet, but they're there often enough that you hold your breath before opening the door each time. Her characters are mostly women — little girls, grandmothers and nannies — who see the world differently than those around them. They know secrets, and they have visions. They are sexual, self-possessed and curious, and that makes them powerful. In one story, "The Water Museum," the main character is a woman who picks up a hitchhiker. She can tell immediately that he is an assassin, sent to murder her. But because she knows who he is, she toys with him, as a cat might gleefully torture its prey. "I have a sneaky suspicion this one might turn out to be interesting," says the woman, after locking the hitchhiker into a room. "When he's good and ready."

Read the whole review here. And of course you can always buy Filter House directly from Aqueduct.

Wiscon 32: Shoujo Bodies

This was a spontaneous panel attended by Mely, Akycha, Heaven's Calyx (HC), Mystic Keeper (MK), Takumashii (T), Nienna, and Alaya Dawn Johnson (ADJ). Names I'll be referring to them by in parentheses.

I don't remember the description that I wrote up for the panel suggestions, but here's the one I posted to the Wiscon community:

Most bodies in shoujo manga are thin and wispy, with an emphasis on androgyny. Many of the men tend to lack muscle definition (think Yuu Watase), while the women are much less curvy than their shounen manga counterparts. What does this mean to us? What other body types are there in shoujo manga? We will hopefully talk about gender-bending, cross-dressing, body image, and the fashion industry. Suggested series to discuss: After School Nightmare, Paradise Kiss, Walkin' Butterfly, Angel Sanctuary, Fruits Basket, W Juliet, Rose of Versailles, and Princess Knight.

I also took no notes, so all this is based purely off of my very faulty memory. Also, I am writing it up grouped by topic, as opposed to following the flow of the conversation, as a) I don't remember the flow and b) I think it will make for an easier-to-read post. [ETA: HC also let me know that many of the things I attributed to her were in fact said by Akycha, so many apologies for the mix up!]

I freaked out a little at having to lead the discussion, but after an awkward beginning for me, people seemed to jump in on their own fairly quickly. Yay participation! I will blame my completely not remembering how the discussion started on nerves. I mentioned that we were mostly going to focus on shoujo manga and manhwa, with some possible delving into shounen manga representations of female bodies, but more as a comparison than an exploration of shounen manga. [ETA: "shoujo" refers to teenage girls, "shounen" to teenage boys, "manga" to Japanese comics, and "manhwa" to Korean comics. Manga is generally categorized by whom the target demographic is; shoujo and shounen are the largest groups, but there's also seinen (adult men) and josei/ladies' (adult women). Yaoi, shounen ai, BL and june refer to a subgenre of shoujo manga that focuses on gay romances.]

Gender-bending and cross-dressing

We may have started with shoujo manga history and how gender-bending and cross-dressing has been there from the very start, with Tezuka Osamu's Princess Knight/Ribon no Kishi [1954-1968, Tezuka is the father of modern manga, both shounen and shoujo], which stars a princess, Sapphire, who's raised as a boy by her parents because they wanted a son and an heir. Someone (T?) pointed out that the interesting thing re: Sapphire is that she actually has two souls (I think?), a male one and a female one. Obligatory mentions of Rose of Versailles [1972-1973, by Rikyoko Ikeda] and [Revolutionary Girl] Utena [1997 anime] as the descendents of Princess Knight, particularly in the 1700s European setting for Rose of Versailles and [the 1700s European] imagery and clothing for Utena. Someone may have drawn a parallel between Sapphire and her two souls and Ichijo from After School Nightmare [2005-now, by Mizushiro Setona] and his male upper body, female lower body (stated in the manga!). I think Mely commented on a reviewer or two who categorized Ichijo not as trans, but as something else all together.

I mentioned how girls-dressed-as-guys tend to be what plots are based on (ex. Rose of Versailles, Princess Knight, Utena, Hana Kimi [1996-2004, by Nakajo Hisaya]), while guys-dressed-as-girls tend to be more one off kink-fulfillment (ex. the obligatory school festival in which the pretty guys dress in women's clothing, mangaka notes saying "And I was so excited when I got to dress [character] as a girl!"). Someone pointed out that the exception was W Juliet [1997-2002, by Emura]. I mentioned how the mangaka notes occasionally squee about dressing up the bishounen as girls, but how the mangaka occasionally also mentions that it's hard because she keeps wanting to draw breasts on the character. There was also a note on how Haruka from Sailor Moon [1992-1997, by Takeuchi Naoko] was the exception to the girls-dressed-as-guys not being a kink thing, ditto with the otoko-yaku of Takarazuka.

Constructs of femininity and masculinity

When going into why guys-in-girls'-clothing was a kink, I think I wondered if some mangaka were vindictively liked having guys know how much effort goes into donning frilly clothing. Mely talked a little about Jennifer Robertson's Takarazuka (about the all-female revue troupe Takarazuka) and how Robertson talked a lot about masculinity as a construct, as demonstrated by the otoko-yaku (the women who specialize in men's roles) taking "masculine" traits and exaggerating them, but also on how Robertson ignores how the female roles and musume-yaku (the women who specialize in women's roles) and how their enactment of femininity is just as constructed. I mentioned the onnagata of kabuki (men specializing in women's roles, as kabuki was all-male, though it started as a female religious performance ritual) and how Edo writers [Edo Japan was 1600-1911], particularly Saikaku, would note that men could play women better than women themselves, because they didn't have the messy female biology to trip them up (!!).

Akycha and HC had lots of cool info about Takarazuka, as HC is an avid fan who has gone to many performances (so cool!) [ETA: seen on tape, not live]. She mentioned how otoko-yaku are far more popular than musume-yaku and that the male roles are considered better, and how when there was a production about Queen Elizabeth, they assigned the role of Elizabeth to an otoko-yaku, even though Elizabeth is female [ETA: Actually it was Elisabeth, about Empress Elisabeth of Austria/Hungary]. HC speculated that this was because the producers or casting directors thought the musume-yaku didn't have the acting chops for the part, but also that they gave the role to the otoko-yaku who's considered more feminine. This coupled with the onnagata led to the thought about how femininity is routinely devalued. I mentioned that it's interesting that "otoko-yaku" means "male/man role" in Japanese, but "musume-yaku" is "daughter role" instead of "female/woman role." I forgot if anyone said this, but there's also a devaluing of female bodies, particularly in kabuki, in which the men play women better than women themselves. There was also a lot of rhetoric in Edo Japan on the yay-ness of nanshoku (male-male love) and how it was purer than women+men because messy biology wasn't in the way, or complications of marriage and money and familial politics.

There was also discussion about the constructs of gender in After School Nightmare and how it's interesting watching Mizushiro move from a more traditional gender binary to the possibility of something that won't make us all tear our hair out. Ichijo begins thinking that if he is attracted to Sou, he must be passive and "feminine" and thereby be female, whereas if he's attracted to Kureha, he must then be active and "masculine" and thereby be male. There's the interesting bit on the assignation of gender based on sexuality. ADJ noted that the construct of sexuality as set (heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual) wasn't there in historical Japan; it was more if you're sleeping with a guy at that moment, it's nanshoku, if you're sleeping with a woman at that moment, it's the Japanese word for that which I have forgotten. I footnoted this by saying it was a view of sexuality focused strictly on men; I don't think there was much female-female love. If there wasn't someone being penetrated, it didn't count as sex. I now remember a few shunga featuring two women pleasuring themselves with dildoes, but I remember reading commentary on how the penetration was still there, and of course the male sex organ, albeit not with a male body attached.

Biology and constructions of gender

Someone also brought up how there's very little looking at the pain and trouble involved with trappings of femininity. We're introduced to Ichijo when he gets his period, and HC or Akycha mentioned how rarely we get to see menstruation in shoujo manga. They brought up an anime that had a guy turning into a girl (Kyou Kara Maou? [ETA: Kashimashi Girl Meets Girl]), in which he has a really hard time shaving his legs and etc., and how we rarely get to see girls in shoujo learning how to be feminine: learning how to shave their legs or wax or deal with menstruation. HC brought up the Nanami's egg episode in Utena as a great example of the anxiety surrounding menstruation (am I too early? Too late? Is mine larger or smaller than normal? Why won't anyone tell me anything about it?), and also Haibane Renmei's portrayal of the growth of wings. It's messy and bloody and painful, but also necessary and a sign of maturity. I mentioned the fears and anxieties surrounding dirty wings in the series, particularly as a mark of sin. Re: leg shaving, I said that maybe it was cultural and less people in Japan shave their legs, since I definitely see fewer ads for shaving implements in Taiwan, but HC and ADJ both said they didn't think so.

The talk went to secondary sex characteristics and how there seemed to be a marked lack of commentary on puberty and the development of secondary sex characteristics in shoujo manga. I brought up Walkin' Butterfly [2004, by Tamaki Chihiro] as an interesting example, because we actually see the heroine's pubic hair, but Mely said it was josei, which explains a lot. I think I also mentioned how it's male puberty as well; most boys in shoujo don't have much muscle definition or facial scruff on the hero, and their body silhouettes are closer to that of the girls. The more similar silhouettes (slimmer hips on the girls, slimmer shoulders on the boys) is also more noticeable when compared to shounen manga art, which tends to exaggerate women's breasts and men's muscles.

Most people said that despite this, they could tell apart the guys and the girls. Mely mentioned how she read Demon Diary when she was first getting into manga (and manhwa) and couldn't tell what sex people were, so she pretended they were all androgynous, but on going back a few years later, she can tell. People shared stories of anime/manga newbies who are confounded by the long flowing bishounen hair and pretty faces, but also how the gender-distinguishing features become more obvious as your eye gets more accustomed to it. I said I always looked at the characters' chests to figure out, which is how I figured out Envy in Fullmetal Alchemist was male and how I got confused by purple-haired pilot in Gundam 00, as his pilot outfit has lumpy bits right around the chest area. I just remembered now that I forgot to comment on the lack of nipples, particularly on women?

I think someone mentioned lolicon (Lolita complex) and Japanese censorship laws, which make it harder to depict pubic hair. Someone also talked about yaoi as an exception to lack of secondary sex characteristics, as yaoi guys tend to have more muscle definition. There was also talk about how uke and seme were distinguished physically with height and hair and eye size and facial shape: more "masculine" guys always have longer faces while more "feminine" guys have shorter, wider faces. [Most yaoi has an active role (seme) and a passive role (uke). "Seme" literally means "aggressor" while "uke" literally means "receiver.] I mentioned that Rose of Versailles is interesting because Oscar gets a typically "masculine" face shape. I think we also all laughed at CLAMP art and how they had two male body templates. I can't remember if anyone said something about the more "feminine" faces as being more childlike (larger eyes, wider face, etc).

ADJ, T, and Emily all talked about how shoujo art is changing, as I think they started out with Sailor Moon and Yuu Watase, in which the women have more hips and breasts. I want to fit in the Sailor Moon Stars characters, who turn from male to female in the anime -- their female forms are the powerful forms, because they're the senshi forms. But of course, they're also dressed in skimpy leather outfits.

Devaluing the female POV

All of us ranted about how so much shoujo starts out focused on the heroine and then ends up focused on the hero's childhood angst and emotional growth (ex. Mars, Kare Kano). Poor ADJ had only seen the Kare Kano anime ("The paper cut outs on sticks episode! Miyazawa kicking Arima!"), and the rest of us grumped about the horrible ending of the manga and how we were all so angry that the most awesome Miyazawa gets shafted for more story about Arima's background, and how we all loved Miyazawa from the beginning because she wasn't the typically sweet shoujo heroine. I can't remember if I said this, but now I note that Miyazawa's interesting as a heroine because she makes us look at femininity as a social construct (I was thinking particularly of how she makes shoujo sparklies and flowers appear on demand). I can't remember if anyone mentioned Rukia in terms of constructs of femininity as well, even though Bleach is shounen. This went along with the devaluing of female bodies in Edo Japan and the devaluing of female roles in Takarazuka.

I think someone mentioned how literature in Japan in Japanese (as opposed to classical Chinese) started as a female tradition (Sei Shonagon, Genji, etc.), but ADJ mentioned the current devaluing of fiction centered on women, particularly with regard to Banana Yoshimoto, who's thought of as a "shoujo" author, despite her not writing manga. She talked about two piececs of scholarship, one from the US and one from Japan, both of which completely write off Yoshimoto as writing about topics that don't matter or being too girly and etc. She particularly mentioned Kitchen, which is focused on home and cooking and food, and is thereby not "serious literature." I mentioned that was particularly interesting because the climax of Kitchen is all about katsudon, which my lit. prof. said was a take-out food, not a cook-at-home food. So even there, Yoshimoto is playing with ideas of gender and food and etc.

Historical gender constructs

We talked a little about historical Japanese constructs of gender; I talked about the Meiji propaganda of "good wife, wise mother" and there being nothing between "child" and "mother/wife" for women to fit into in historical Japan. Mely I think noted that this paralleled the rise of the concept of adolescence in the West and probably Victorian gender roles as well. I mentioned the start of shoujo magazines around the Meiji Era [1868-1912]; I don't know much about them myself, but my Japanese prof. advisor had mentioned them as an avenue of research for me and a way to look at the beginning of the concept of the "shoujo" in Japan. We also talked about adolescent anxiety and shoujo manga scholarship that boxes the gender "messiness" of shoujo manga as rising solely from Japanese shoujo's fears and anxieties about growing up in a sexist society and having to become a wife and mother. Mely and I particularly hate this theory, as the scholars who propose it think it rises solely from Japanese culture and the same arguments come up in slash academic writing, and that it is a limited look as to how wide the representations of gender and sexuality are in shoujo manga alone.

More that I am too lazy to categorize

Mely talked about Kyoko Okazaki's works (unlicensed) and at Okazaki's look at the fashion industry, which capitalizes on the deliberate construct of femininity. I think she quoted one bit in which the heroine, a model, has basically been surgically "enhanced" everywhere except her cunt (I think that word's in the quote?). Someone else mentioned the rise of cosmetical female genital surgery in the US, so technically, the heroine could be all surgically enhanced. There was some mention of the tall, lanky, thin shoujo silhouette as being that of a model and how there's that story that keeps being retold of the girl who hates her body but finds out it's... perfect for modelling! (Walkin' Butterfly, I swear I've read this in US YA lit as well.) I noted that while I am pro body acceptance, I feel the fashion industry is not the best way to it.

There was also a discussion of bodily mutilation and how men and boys are allowed to have sexy scars. Mely mentioned how it's a sign that the guys have survived something and lived past it, how they had tragic angst written on their bodies, but how shoujo bodies had to be perfect and flawless and history-less to be valuable. I noted that I generally do not argue for further violence to be written on female bodies, but in the case of manga, violence and scarring is a sign of caring, both in terms of mangaka regard and in terms of audience reaction to the characters. I think we agreed that it was important that it wasn't sexualized violence written on shoujo bodies, but violence in terms of angsty backstory and something that makes the heroine stronger and more awesome. I threw in a reference to Bride with White Hair, as there's a really interesting scene in which the heroine has to literally crawl over hot coals and razors and get whipped by her clan to exit her clan; it's a striking scene of non-sexualized violence done to a woman. Someone also noted that the difference between that and violence to women in SPN, say, was that reader/viewer sympathy lay with the person enduring the violence.

... and now I remember that the discussion started with talk of subjectivity and objectivity in manga, and how the heroines and heroes can often be both subject and object because of the medium. I think T noted how shoujo manga is frequently narrated from a first person POV (usually the heroine's POV), and how Nana is exceptional because it's focused on the two Nanas talking to each other via the narration (as opposed to the dialogue bubbles). But T noted that because manga is drawn, even though we're thrust into the heroine's POV via voiceovers and narration, we're also in the position to view her body (and the hero's body) as objects, because we are also looking at their outsides and not just at their inner POVs.

We briefly went into manhwa art style and how it's different (particularly the lips and eyes, particularly in that people have prominent lips). Mely mentioned how she might be overgeneralizing, but liked that manhwa tended to have angrier, less sweet heroines, as opposed to manga, and I think all of us agreed about that. I think I might have noted that the downside to that is that the anger is often directed at other women and girls in terms of romantic rivalry? But that may just be from my kdrama watching. I then went on a handwavy overgeneralization as to how I think US media tends to reward the "masculine" in that we have more women warriors and assertion and other stereotypically masculine traits but the men are not allowed to be "girly," whereas Japanese media may reward the "feminine" more in that the men are allowed to be more emotional and vulnerable and other stereotypically feminine traits but the women are not allowed to be aggressive.

There was also talk on how filmed media tends to be more conservative than printed media overall (Asian dramas, US TV shows vs. manga, written SF/F) and how a lot of that might be because of business models... there's a limited amount of TV channels, a limited amount of shows studios can put out, and less of a limitation on print (albeit still a limit).

And then we ran out of time, and I realized we hadn't talked about the lack of different types of bodies at all, including in terms of age, weight, race, and etc.

Thoughts

Overall, this was one of my favorite panels from Wiscon, probably because a) I suggested it, b) the spontaneous programming meant mostly people who knew about shoujo manga came, and c) I felt I finally got to go as in depth as I wanted to in a panel. The last bit is largely influenced by the second bit; thought not everyone was familiar with every series discussed, it seemed like most people had read a fair amount of shoujo manga and manga overall, and that most people were fairly familiar with Japan, so there was very little 101 to do. I loved being able to talk about so many works and to connect them all, and am only sad that we couldn't keep going for the entire night.

Crossposted here, with some edits made to the Aqueduct post for clarity and fact correcting.

WisCon 32 Panel 31 and Afterward

I didn’t take notes on the next two convention events I attended. The first, after a brief exchange with Timmi and Beth in the corridor, was Joan Haran’s “Can Fans and College Teachers Be Friends?” panel (the prospects ended up looking pretty good), officially entitled “Academics and Fans: Bringing Them Together I.” At the start Joan (pictured at left) said, “Okay, a number of us are academics; and I think all of us identify as fans, except for Josh, who’s not sure.” She focused the discussion on very practical matters as to what could be done for the Academic Track of programming which she’s in charge of. Evidently the Academic Track has been kept a distinct programming thread in part because people needed institutional funding to get to the con, and saying that you’ve presented a paper and earned a cv line is necessary for that. Most people were okay with the idea of having panels on which people presented papers (although there were some suggestions that the papers could be briefer to allow more discussion, and some questions as to whether copies of the papers could legally be made available for con-goers); a few had had their beefs with this or that academic style. Two or three guys said they’d seen academics come ‘round like old school anthropologists, trying to put fans under the microscope; grad student KB [I think she’s the strawberry blonde head in the foreground of the first picture here] said she’d had some trouble with profs who looked at her work on SF and said she had to cite “all the French poststructuralists.” HOLDEN, I think it was, cited the spectre of Henry Jenkins and his Fan Culture studies.

Two of the more dramatic contributions to the discussion came from MIKE LOWREY –not the first big, loud, hirsute, Scotch-Irish rural anarchist American named Mike I’d ever met, but the gentlest. He expressed relief that the “academic track” was, thanks to our discussion, going to be renamed the “Science Fiction Research Track,” since he’d always thought it was only for people with academic jobs and not clerical workers like himself. And he was quite generous in the discussion of academics needing institutional support. But, thanks to his past history, he had a bit of a “transference moment,” when, thanks (as I later found out) to unresolved old traumas, he thought it meet to talk in defensive tones about his class origins: “I’m a cracker!” he roared, “I’m one generation away from the cotton fields!” Which provoked KB to point out that you could still be “an academic” in that situation: “Look,” she said in a more pronounced Southern accent than his, “I’m also one generation removed from the cracker fields!” At some point after which I had to note that “I’m not one generation removed from the crack fields; my grandfathers were both petit bourgeois. But I’m contingent faculty, like the bulk of college teachers in the U.S., so I’m unlikely to be in a more secure or prosperous position than anyone!” Mike nodded knowingly: like most of the other discussants, he seemed to oppose the idea, held by his forebears, that mental labor was not “real work.”

People seemed generally pleased that the discussion had gone more or less amicably, and a couple of women volunteered to help Joan with the Academic, er, Science Fiction Research Track for next year. I chatted with a number of participants afterward, mentioning my unease with the anti-theory position I’d heard advanced in an earlier panel. Told Nisi I’d been at the “Can Academics and Fans Be Friends?” discussion and she said happily, “They can be roommates!” Then got involved in a discussion, or discussions with MIKE, KB, and a couple of shortish, pale, hefty young men in thick glasses, men I’ll call MERCHANT and IVORY. MERCHANT, the sort of fan who had a hard time seeing how anyone could disagree with the politics of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress or The Doomsday Book, had a multitude of facts at his command, many of them wrong, and was happy to have found in KB someone painfully aware of holes in her SF knowledge so he could Explain It All. I brought up a couple of topics, mostly sympathizing with KB and expressing agreement or disagreement with MERCHANT; the quiet IVORY, used to listening to his friend pontificate, went online to look up the relevant data when MERCHANT and I had a factual disagreement and resolved it in my favor.

The most memorable bits of my conversation with KB –it was pretty much just the two of us after an hour, although MIKE was still IIRC around and talked a little about his life –were her accounts of her life as a nontraditional grad student in rural Mississippi teaching freshman comp: although she’s a native of the U.S. South, she finds the culture in that particular region very stressful; and WisCon is the only time of the year she gets to see people with values similar to her own. Otherwise, it’s dealing with the preachers who come to the house she shares with her Swiss husband and try to save them, or with hired men and neighbors who just burst into giggles when they see her using hardware or gardening implements and insist on talking to The Man of the House, or with students whom she tries endlessly to persuade to write papers that cite evidence other than Bible quotes. She regularly asks these kids what languages the Bible that they endlessly invoke was originally written in –she was very proud when one student, coming closer to a correct answer than any of the others, said “Uh . . . Italian?”

We spoke of these and of literary and theoretical issues until 1:30 Saturday morning.

Update on Plugged In

In a post over at io9.com, titled "UNIX-based A.I. and a Siemens Arificial Womb for Men," Annalee Newitz has reviews Plugged In. Here's a snippet:

Need a quick dose of weird, brainy science fiction but don't have time to commit to an entire short story collection? Then consider a new kind of book, from Aqueduct Press, which you might call a short story single, with an A-Side and a B-Side (though both stories get an A from this reader). Plugged In contains "The Man Who Plugged In," by L. Timmel Duchamp and "Kingdom of the Blind" by Maureen McHugh. Both authors were guests of honor at Wiscon in May, and I grabbed a signed copy at that event. We hear that it will soon be available from Aqueduct.

As a matter of fact, copies of Plugged In will arrive at Aqueduct on Friday, so we'll be putting the title up on our Orders page in the next day or two. I'll be sure to let y'all know when we've got it set up.

ETA: Plugged In can now be purchased through Aqueduct's site here.

WisCon 32 Panel 19: "Thinking Ahead"

At 8:45 that same day, I made my way to my second panel, the unwieldily-titled “Thinking Ahead: Feminist thinking about possible near and middle futures and feminist responses to them,” moderated by Rebecca Holden (photographed to the left, just as the person she was Holden had vanished) and featuring Sylvia Kelso, L. Timmel Duchamp, Moondancer Drake, and Xakara.

Holden asked the panelists to say something about who they were or why they were here–a risky approach, but one that worked well enough. XAKARA spoke of how we are at a point where even our allies aren’t terribly comfortable being labeled “feminists” and how many self-styled feminists aren’t living up to the term. She writes fiction with bi- and polyamorous situations, depicting many variations of families. MOONDANCER DRAKE spoke of being Cherokee and writing LGBT fiction; TIMMI DUCHAMP admitted that, although she always says that in her fiction she’s writing about the present, she is imagining the future, and one inhabited by people like us. SYLVIA KELSO spoke of her scholarship and of how her fiction is getting more parameter-bending. REBECCA HOLDEN styles herself an academic and a fan, and mentioned how she’d added the two new panelists [XAKARA and DRAKE] to complicate the panel description and problematize feminism, to show the necessity of multiple stories on political topics, to avoid that View from Nowhere which assumes that we’re standing outside experience and ideology when in fact we’re just universalizing our own perspective, because that View ends up being the very one in which feminists and other liberatory movements are accused of promoting “special interests” and doing “special pleading.”

HOLDEN: What are the challenges that you see feminists facing in the near future?

XAKARA: Many women of color believe the feminist movement is over and see racial struggle as separate. They don’t realize that these fractures between movements occurred recently; they feel that color is primary and that we’re still struggling in the old issues.

DRAKE: On the other side, people of color, women of color talk about race and privilege, while white feminists believe that gender trumps everything else. Today, the older second-wave white feminists who express support for Clinton by dismissing Obama leave a lot of people feeling disrespected –a lot of hurt feelings, a lot of people walking away, a sense that people need to push aside who we are. We need to address what as human beings we deserve. My kids –I’m raising my son and my daughter as feminists, and we need to pay attention to mothers and mothering, especially to raising sons, to teaching boys their responsibility, to teaching them love and respect; it’s imperative to see our sons doing something with their male privilege.

DUCHAMP: We’re starting to see the beginnings of real scarcity of resources, of energy –and heightened reproductive issues that make race and class issues emerge sharply, as well as the ways priorities differ by race and class. Ideology and technology are changing things, with no real public discourse to address that. Access to health care and education are getting worse, and the public sphere, the area for discourse that helps make decision on politics, continues to shrink. Certain feminisms facilitate skills that can enable us to deal fruitfully with these issues: we know things that other people don’t and need to exploit these.

KELSO: I’m coming from a different background. I hear our Deputy Prime Minister, who is a woman, is going to fight for equal pay for women; and I ask, is this 2008 or 1968? Can we get into the public discourse? What resources does feminism have now? Is there a feminist movement that could actually do something politically? No. And where I come from, without the academic traditions of the U.S., we see more feminism in the civil service and much less in education and in the academy.

HOLDEN: I’m interested in the ideas Timmi raised, about what resources we have, material and otherwise; and what we’re hearing from Moondancer about parenting and women of color. I read in the Washington Post about the rise of women in Rwanda’s economic revival: in the face of scarcity and the need to improvise, they’re willing to try new things, unlike most of that country’s tradition-bound men. So female agency in such places is also an “untapped resource” for feminism.

KELSO: They’re up against what we’ll be up against in 15-25 years.

DRAKE: I find it very hopeful and satisfying to see a woman who lacks theoretical grounding in feminism find her empowerment and do what she needs.

KELSO: An enormous number of communities in Australia are doing great things with ecology and sustainability –this is a place where women have the experience to be very good at the practical side.

DRAKE: I think we can expand the concept of Green Mondays.

KELSO: We have a huge reservoir of age wisdom.

DRAKE: The idea of dismissing the elderly is alien to my culture: being Dianic, our crones are sacred to us.

KELSO: But in the capitalist world, you have your sell-by date.

XAKARA: Capitalism is actually helping the elderly, because suddenly we’re realized: They’ve got money! Going Green too has become a great marketing tool. I realize the greatest resource for feminism is stealth: introduce the ethical once they’ve accepted one goal.

DRAKE: It’s drive-by enlightenment!

XAKARA: Feminism only elicits passion if it’s connected to something you can get passionate about.

DRAKE: We still see the media’s idealization of youth: after a certain point, the story’s not about you anymore. We have to be the ones to tell the stories we want to see about hot fortyish and fiftyish women.

BETH’s partner DAN, from the audience: Eliminating older women from the story is a way to disempower women.

DRAKE: People are afraid of the creative power of menopause.

Audience: I don’t want to arouse political conflict here, but look at the vilification of Clinton.

DRAKE: I think she, or her campaign and some of her supporters made a mistake: supporting her should not involve making people feel sorry for her.

XAKARA: As a woman in a position of power, she’d be easy to vilify: everybody knew that from life, or from the movies. But, at least in my neighborhood, in the world in which I grew up, Yes, you were afraid of women in menopause, ‘cause they don’t care! They’ll tell you what they think! And that fear –what happens if women aren’t afraid of not being nice –has been very visible; and instead of, as you say, asking people to feel sorry for her, she should have pointed at the other people’s laundry.

Audience: There’s that distinction between being nice and being good. We respect good in a man, but not so much in a woman.

Audience: The second wave of feminism came after the civil rights movement, as the splits came in on identity politics. Consciousness-raising and demonstrations were challenging hierarchies from the bottom up and were not interested in “political” power, narrowly defined. And in the last twenty years around the world, we’ve seen activist movements, anarchists, revolutionaries, with more women in authority: anti-hierarchical second-wave policies have worked their way into activism in general.

DUCHAMP: We sometimes don’t realize how big a change that has made.

HOLDEN: Nobody is talking about scarcity: everybody is working on the principle of abstinence-education –deal with the risks by not talking about it.

DUCHAMP: We’re at a point where younger women in Women Studies classes get upset over the uncivil topic of abortion: they see it not as political but as a sleazy moral issue. The Right has had a lot of success in reshaming the issue.

Audience: Look at the global effects of our country’s sex-ed policy, our military, our chemical corporations!

HOLDEN: When I was in Kenya at a mission hospital, their Christians were much more open and active about HIV than the Christians one sees raising the issue in this country.

XAKARA: Our side doesn’t protest mediocrity: we don’t pull our kids out of the abstinence class the way the Christian Right pulls theirs out of sex ed –if we did, the schools would say, Hey, there’s nobody here, we need to do something different! And it’s because the kids don’t come to us to tell us about what’s being done to them in schools. We need to go to them –abstinence programs have made them afraid to ask questions.

Audience: I think this whole thing is about how you frame a story, ideally to challenge all the simplistic choices the dominant discourse offers us. That’s why what writers do is political work, and it’s so important.

DRAKE says that’s what her writing does and offers an example of how.

An audience member raises the issue of how Soviet SF was a great medium for underground protest.

HOLDEN: Good fiction doesn’t preach –it tells a complicated story.

KELSO talks about how much context and explanation she needs to offer before teaching an SF story in a “Women in Literature” course that doesn’t focus on SF.

Audience: What tools of activism are you talking about?

DUCHAMP: Nonhierarchical organization, consciousness-raising, listening to one another’s stories, making things complicated, collectivities, the lost idea that everyone deserves to thrive.

HOLDEN makes a comment about what each of us can do.

XAKARA: Stealth feminism can work by building on something that’s already hip, like the ecology movement –you can build up to the “everyone deserves to thrive” message with, Don’t you agree that no one should have polluted water? Sure I do, let’s do something about it! And moving on from there with other “Don’t you agree?” arguments. And each person can affect one other person and encourage them to do the same. Once women believe that, they’ll work like gangbusters.

Audience starts asking questions about motivating recalcitrant people or engaging with frustrating interlocutors.

DRAKE: Sometimes you just gotta show ‘em, and that’s all you can do.

More discussion of that issue among HOLDEN and DUCHAMP and Audience.

DRAKE: There is nothing more satisfying than watching the children who are growing up at WisCon, and seeing how different they are from some others [less thuggish, more generous? My foggy memory can't do her point justice . . . ]

Audience member asks DRAKE about persuading some particularly challenging friends of feminism’s possibilities. She passes the question to XAKARA, who asks, “Have you tried minor deception?” and demonstrates the diplomatic tack of feigning a very tentative and innocent attitude when you bring up a challenge to someone’s prejudices.

As you see, my note-taking hand got tired toward the end of the panel; but it was still an invigorating discussion. I could completely relate to KELSO’s struggle to introduce SF in a lit course, as I’d spent ninety minutes doing that this past semester. But listening to XAKARA, I could not help thinking about Martha Nussbaum. Now, XAKARA is thirty-four years old, African-American, and middle-sized, with a dynamic speaking style that could invigorate any audience: I’m not suggesting that she has the same blind spots that a tall, thin, low-key WASP aristocrat of sixty-one would. But there seemed to be to be a big distinction in framing: DRAKE was talking about what we deserve and seeing women empower themselves, and XAKARA was talking pedagogically; and it seemed to me to be a pedagogy not unlike that of Cultivating Humanity and indeed to overlook the issues of subjectivity that John McGowan says Nussbaum overlooks.

See, in Cultivating Humanity, Nussbaum says “we” need to expand our circles of compassion, and she appeals to the virtues that Cicero recognized, or that Marcus Aurelius recognized, and talks about what “we” can learn from reading about Bigger Thomas or Invisible Man. And XAKARA’s language too framed the selling-points of feminism as connected to the altruism, if I’m not mistaken, of an audience with a strong sense of agency. It seemed to me that she was all about persuading people to endorse or want change. And I think that awareness that alternatives exist and belief that change is possible precedes that stage, and is a harder sell to make. Again, it’s so easy to fall into the dichotomy of the “us” who have the cultural options and the “them” we have to learn compassion for; and that doesn’t really take one beyond the “missionary” view. DRAKE's "You just gotta show 'em" has a lot of possibilities, though: Models, Context, Peers (words Timmi keeps repeating) are things you can "show."

The theme of what tactics we take in proselytizing for The Cause, or facilitating empowerment, continued when I met BETH in the hallway after the panel and she was still thinking about her exchange with HAIRSTON: BETH opined, "You know, there's certain people out there that, if you listen to them, you can engage them." The issue of whether women have the option to be good was raised, movingly, in DUCHAMP's reading the following morning, as she cited an essay by Alice Sheldon:

As Tiptree, I had an unspoken classificatory bond to the world of male action; Tiptree's existence opened to unknown possibilities of power. And, let us pry deeper--to the potential of evil. Evil is the voltage of good; the urge to goodness, without the potential of evil, is trivial. A man impelled to good is significant; a woman pleading for the good is trivial. A great bore. Part of the appeal of Tiptree was that he ranged himself on the side of good by choice.

Alli Sheldon has no such choice.

What evil can a woman do? Except pettily, to other, weaker, women or children? Cruel Stepmothers; male fantasies of the Wicked Witch, who can always be assaulted or burnt if she goes too far. Men certainly see women as doing many evil things--but always nuisancy, trivial, personal, and, easily-to-be-punished-for. Not for us the great evils; the jolly maraudings, burnings, rapings, and hacking-up; the Big Nasties, the genocidal world-destroyers, who must be reckoned with on equal terms.

In addition to citing Sheldon's "insight about women's lack of moral credibility" in her reading, DUCHAMP did a good deal of "Thinking Ahead" in the Q&A that followed that reading, saying "I believe it's possible to have a nonhierarchical society" but also, in the course of a discussion of the utility or harmfulness of using the term "evil," noting "I don't think there's some intrinsic Evil in us; I think we're always going to be hurting one another . . . " Which I take as a generous rather than a pessimistic view of humanity.

Another Iraqi Liberated from All Mortal Woes

I just saw that Leila Hussein, who'd had the courage to leave her husband in Basra after he proudly killed their teen-aged daughter, has herself been murdered. Horrifying.

Unfortunately, I learned this through Pharyngula and neglected to consider Swirksy's observation elsewhere on this very blog that the comments there are a cesspit. The bulk of the commenters are ranting, "This shows the evils of Islam!" and "This would never happen in the secular West!" and responding to more nuanced interpretations with "How can you say AMERICA has something to do with these crimes?"

Without excusing the triggermen, I think it clear that Leila Hussein's death is another of the hundreds of thousands for which Cheney, Wolfie, Rummy, Feith, Rice, Powell, their cheerleaders in the media, and every unrepentant supporter of the AUMF bears responsibility.

Talking About Class

I have finished the essay Josh sent me on the lower middle class and read the posts here on the Wiscon identity panel and done some thinking out loud by myself. I am wondering if it might be worthwhile considering a group blog on class.

What I actually started thinking about was the early days of second wave feminism, when we had consciousness raising groups, because many women simply could not think about sexism. It was right there in front of them, but they couldn't see it clearly. Remember "the personal is political?"

My experience of the Wiscon class panel is -- when people start talking about their own class background, the panel disappears into a black hole.

But in reading the essay Josh sent me, I kept thinking, "that isn't the way I have experienced life" and "if that is true, how do you explain my father?"

So personal experience does matter. But it probably can't be handled in a 75 minute panel.

Which leads to the idea of the group blog...

I'm also thinking it might be a good idea to have discussions of the topic at next year's Wiscon -- an hour or two in a room, where people begin to explore the topic. What is class? How does it influence our lives?

I think we may have jumped a whole stage of exploration in trying to do class panels that come to a conclusion.

Reflecting on Josh and Micole's Notes on the It's Not about Identity Panel

After reading both Josh and Micole's notes on the "It's Not About Identity" panel at WisCon, it occurs to me that another item that ought to be added to the list I compiled during the course of the panel is reflection. Reflection, in my view, is de rigueur for feminist process. And so it is, for me, that post-con discussions of WisCon panels that go beyond brief sketches (as Josh and Micole's sets of notes do) are of interest not only to people who didn't attend the panels but also to the panelists and audience members who did. This, of course, is one of the assumptions underlying Aqueduct's WisCon Chronicles series. And it is the reason I wrote the essay examining last year's Romance of the Revolution panel.

The assumption doesn't make sense, of course, unless one regards panels as instances of public discourse. (I.e., takes panel discourse seriously.) WisCon's status as public space makes it vulnerable, of course, to hostile interference; that's the nature of public space. But it's important for women to occupy public space: this is something feminists have been insisting upon for centuries and is what makes WisCon more than just a fun social event (which it also, of course, is).

But to get back to reflection. Josh and Micole's notes have helped me reflect on the panel. I can certainly understand Micole's discomfort with the choice of FGM as a make-or-break issue among international feminists working in coalition; the example that came into my own mind was abortion, but another panelist was quicker with this other example, and it's not my way as a moderator to override panelists when they're on-topic. When I mentioned FGM as partly a matter of social hygiene, I was specifically thinking of the still apparently little-known parallel to the fashion of cosmetic clitoral cutting in the US today. A few years back in my annual reading list for Fantastic Metropolis I recommended an article by Simone Weil Davis, "Loose Lips Sink Ships," published in the Spring 2002 issue of Feminist Studies, about "the new elective sex surgeries"-- "trimming" the labia and "cleaning up" the vulva-- an article that drew some startling parallels between "aesthetic" plastic surgery and FGM. I didn't get a chance to expand on that but was happy to cede the floor to Andrea, who explained the social issue of adult identity involved for the Mende.

As my memory has it (but since my memory's not what it used to be, I can't swear that I'm remembering correctly, and I haven't yet listened to the audio-file I made of the discussion), no one on the panel talking about the two sides of the FGM issue ever suggested their was any question of saving non-Western women from FGM. I assumed we were talking about what sort of issues might have to be bracketed when working in coalition. And so the question in this case would be "Do you work with women who favor FGM [thus bracketing your moral or political opposition to FGM], or do you refuse, no matter how important it might be to work with them on another issue, because you don't want to be complicit?" That's what bracketing is about. It seems from Micole's post that that must not have come across as clearly as I'd assumed.

IIRC, the only patronizing/missionary-attitude expressed was toward the women in Beth's small town, as Josh pointed out to me not long after the panel, noting the irony. (And I do think he and Micole are right to mention this.)

Perhaps if we'd used abortion or frequent elective plastic surgery as examples of an issue that might require bracketing, the panel might have ventured into the area that I'm guessing (in retrospect) Sylvia may have been interested in talking about. Abortion, I've been told by people who teach university-level Women's Studies courses, has become a taboo subject for many college-age women, too shameful to be mentioned (much less discussed) in public. And as I know from personal experience, sometimes feminists find it necessary to work in coalition with stridently anti-abortion groups.

Micole put her finger on an important problem when she wrote:

I agree more with the approach I perceived the rest of the panel as advocating, so I was more interested in hearing their takes, but I also feel like this was an example of the kind of differences feminists need to be exploring rather than smoothing over--that there was a lot of talk of conflict management and managing disagreement, but that what was operating was often an all-too-familiar dynamic of "feminine" discomfort with disagreement and patriarchial deliberate obliviousness to difference.

On the one hand, if the panel had lacked the fragile bit of consensus that it did have, we probably would not have had such a lively discussion and would have gotten bogged down in matters of definition. On the other hand, if the consensus had broken down at any point, it might have offered some (perhaps painful) illumination into the very issue we were talking about. Part of the problem, I think, is that these discussions aren't ongoing-- being one-offs, there's no opportunity to reflect and then re-engage-- there's just the moment, and then, sometimes, the possibility of reflecting (with the help of comments like Josh and Micole's)-- and that's it-- unless there's a second round at the next WisCon (though usually follow-up panels don't work quite like that).


Thank you, Josh and Micole. The art of conversation, as I'm always saying, is not easy, even though, at its most exciting, it tends to look that way.

Review of Feminist Philosophy And Science Fiction: Utopias And Dystopias Up on SF Revu

My review of Judith Little's Feminist Philosophy And Science Fiction: Utopias And Dystopias is now up on SF Revu. As the review makes clear, I was very disappointed in this book. It plows no new ground -- the newest story in the anthology was published in 1996 and most date from the 1970s -- and the supporting materials are uninspired.