More Wiscon thoughts

[redbird]

This is a comment from a meta-discussion in wiscon:

It's a weird mixture: there was (imho) less interesting political programming, but there was a definite Democratic party/Kerry presence, right in front of con registration part of the time. I pulled one anti-Bush poster off the "Official Wiscon Announcements" bulletin board on the grounds that, while I agreed with it, it wasn't official Wiscon business (and, secondarily, that I very much doubted Victor or the concom had been asked about posting it).

On another tentacle, there's no way that a con Wiscon's size, with a specific focus on feminist science fiction, is going to make everyone feel welcome. Non-feminists may feel lost; non-sf-readers, moreso.

For what it's worth, all I know of haikujaguar's political views is that she identifies as a Republican--that can cover a lot of ground, and I don't know whether she considers herself a feminist, much less what sort. Wiscon seems to attract and encourage people--and I'm one of them--for whom feminism is richer and more complicated than giving women access to the stereotypically male positions of power.

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There's a long-standing tension in fandom, lots of different areas of fandom, between being inclusive and being focused. There's no all-or-nothing answer, which is why it's an ongoing discussion/argument/problem: too focused and your group/con/fandom risks dying out, too inclusive and it loses the aspects that made it interesting to the original members and that would attract other people who would enjoy their company and activities. Wiscon [or any con] is more than "we'll grab 700 random people and drop them in Madison for a weekend"; given that, it's not obvious how to attract 500-800 of the right people, when there's no good definition of who the right people are, except the self-referential one that they're likely to come back for a second Wiscon if they try it once.

You can--and I think the Wiscon committee does--put information out where people can find it, information as basic as "feminist science fiction convention" and who a given year's guests of honor are and that the Tiptree Award (www.tiptree.org) was created at Wiscon, and as detailed as putting the entire program schedule, with lists of participants and a paragraph on the back of each one describing each panel, on the Web ahead of time. And you still don't know. You're still dealing with everything from the unreliability of rumor--yes, men are welcome at Wiscon--to the imponderability of how a particular panel will happen on the day, when three people walk in, not having discussed it ahead of time, sit in front of a room full of interested people, and talk for 75 minutes.

This seems to tie in a bit to the above-referenced panel on "the dark side of community", and in particular the point that it's easy for communities to be defined, not (or not only) as "we are the people who have X in common" but as "we are the not-Ys." One of the less obvious dangers of that is that it's usually inaccurate: for example, there are people who assume that fans don't exercise, or that athletes and intellectuals are mutually-exclusive sets. Another, related part is that people who might be included in "we do X" are excluded because they also do Y.

Granted, not all combinations work--and that's true of organizations as well as recipes. And it's easy to say "well, let's try more of them", but human time and energy run out a lot faster than the contents of a well-stocked larder.

This is incomplete, but I want to toss it into the conversation before it becomes out of date. Also, see
wild_irises's recent post on this set of topics.

Comments

[brithistorian.livejournal.com]

This is one of the clearest posts on this subject I've come across. I must confess that I had never heard of Wiscon until a few months ago, and at the time I first heard of it I was completely unaware of feminist SF beyond The Handmaid's Tale (which I have read) and The Left Hand of Darkness (which I have not read, but always feel like I should). So I was intrigued, and the more I looked into it, the more interested I got - it looked like the folks at Wiscon were actually using SF as a lens to view the world rather than (as happens far too often) as simple escapism. I was particularly attracted to the broader vision of feminism I saw in the things I read about Wiscon - a concern not just with the status of women, but with the status of all possible genders, and the relationships among them. Nothing I saw made me feel that as a man I would be unwelcome or unvalued at Wiscon. And yet I wonder at haikujaguar's reaction. Surely she must have been aware that as a Republican she would represent at best "the other" for many people at Wiscon, and at worst "the enemy" for quite a few of them. Surely she must have been expected that she would see and hear many things that would be in opposition to her beliefs. Perhaps there's more going on here that I didn't see (I wasn't at the convention, and don't have time to read everything that was LJ'ed after it), but for the most part what I see are people taking an unpleasant situation, discussing it quite reasonably, and going on from there. (There will always be those who are incapable or unwilling to do this, but I see no need to give them further publicity, as everyone already knows who they are anyway.)