The disadvantage to taking a month and a half with this is, of course, that all those mental notes I made to myself to remember and write about certain things are starting to look like they've been through the wash a few times. That's one reason this half will be a bit sparser; the other is that by mid-Sunday I found myself just plain worn out.
~ Sunday ~
I woke up at a slightly-more-reasonable hour (6:30? 7:00?) and managed to overlap with my roommate at the hostel for a while in the morning. This began a very entertaining trend of running into him and having substantial conversations more and more after I left the hostel to go back for one more night at the hotel.
First panel of the day:
"Shapeshifters: moral ambiguity & sexual threat"I didn't manage to take any notes for this panel, which I now regret. Part of it was because I was mostly just noting book titles in my notes at that point and most of the discussion revolved around movies, computer games, and comic book series whose titles flew by me too fast to be written down. I do remember a few things, though:
Many sf and fantasy stories involve characters capable of shapeshifting. While Deep Space 9's Odo represents law and order, the character of Mystique in X-Men is morally ambiguous in the comicsverse and largely evil in the movieverse. Such issues of morality may be connected to discomfort with the idea of impermanently sexed bodies, which are particularly threatening when "essentially" female people can make a convincing physical claim to patriarchal power by "wearing" male bodies. It is particularly noticeable in the X-Men movies that while Mystique often shapeshifts into sexually desirable women, she never becomes a sexually desirable man except when she mimics Wolverine to escape capture. In the comics, she was involved in a canon lesbian relationship, but still has never been represented as a sexual actor of any kind while in a male body.
- A gap in fictional representation between mimetic/decietful/villanous shapechangers and hapless/pathetic/comic ones, the uncovered territory being the heroic. (I wish I'd remembered Octavia Butler's Wild Seed as a complicating work for this line of thought.)
- A sense that shapeshifting ties in with the idea that women's power is indirect or borrowed or manipulative -- and, thus, that being or becoming a shapeshifter amplifies female characters (see also "Ginger Snaps"). For male characters, shapeshifting feminizes them, making them emotionally weak and withdrawn, or wily and villanous (See Oz in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in contrast to the (evil) female werewolf he encounters). Counter-argument presented of a newish trend in romance novels for male werewolves as strong romantic leads.
- Proprioception: most of the "how does this relate to the real world" content of the panel centered on transgender identities, and Lorraine D. brought up that her proprioceptive sense always indicated a female body to her, even when the mirror didn't match it. Another panelist talked about how her job maipulating heavy tools and materials (granite sheets, I think) changed her awareness of her body, and how she can instantly distinguish someone who's only putting on the gear (hardhat, toolbelt, steel-toes, etc.) from someone whose body has adapted to it. Coming back to fiction, this was presented as a problem for 'deceitful' shapeshifters; returning yet again to the real world was the observation that part of the knowledge and identity of being a particular person is tied up in kinesthetic processes.
- Character creation (including but not limited to gender selection) in multiplayer online games as a crude sort of shapeshifting -- though not a particularly subversive one, in the end. (I now want to design a shapeshifter MMORPG.)
- My own small observation that Odo from Deep Space Nine is a walking exhibit of the hazards of assigning "male" to an unknown person or a person of unknown gender. (Odo can't maintain particularly detailed shapes for very long, and thus makes a lousy humanoid -- but the scientist who first discovered Odo adrift in space apparently felt the need to train Odo to assume a default shape that mimics not only a species that Odo is not, but a gender that Odo is not as well.)
This was the one panel I wanted most to keep going in the Spillover Programming Room, and the one that got closest. If I were on the concom (or the architect of the Madison Concourse Hotel, I guess), the only thing I would change would be to pull the spillover room out from behind that pillar and put it somewhere more central -- in the con in my mind, panel conversations spark extra-panel conversations that have a chance of bumping into and informing each other in the halls, and I felt like the main obstacle to that at WisCon was not mutual interest but geography. I *did* get in an interesting elaboration with Rain about what she saw as the two axes of transgender characters -- success at passing vs. the scale of heroic or sympathetic capability that falls off into comic relief on the left and villany on the right -- and how she feels that the two axes have both been collapsed into one and the middle excluded.
After that I snuck in a little late to the New Wave Fabulists reading, but I still caught Matt Ruff reading the first bit of Set This House in Order, Ben Rosenbaum reading a story that may or may not be called "The Frog Comrade" (broadly funny and gently touching), and Wendy Walker with a stunningly lush excerpt that I mention here to remind myself to go looking for her books, as I'd never heard of her before and I'm glad I did.
Lunch! I think it might have been in reference to conversation around this table that I wrote myself the cryptic note "Dragonslayer? Kushner? ask Mary Anne." If so, that was also about the time that I started forming a thought about whether fiction like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Alias might be functioning in a way that sort of immunizes the culture at large against the idea of a capable woman, making her acceptable in extraordinary circumstances while undercutting her in ordinary ones (see the appalling-looking trailer for "My Super Ex-Girlfriend" for the terminus of that train).
Next panel:
Pushing the EnvelopeNotes:
Melissa Scott's Shadow Man is an example of the thesis that the most cutting-edge writing/thinking about gender (i.e., about deconstructing the binary sex-gender system) is happening in science fiction, though almost no SF/F out there has pushed our ideas about sex-and-gender as radically as that book did (though some have come close). In his post-W28 livejournal, Jed Hartmann said, "I think the real-world spectrum of gender possibilities is more interesting and broader than most of what's available in SF." Sadly, that appears to be true. How do we push the envelope? How do we effectively clamor for more radical thinking/imagining about sex and gender in SF/F? What can fans do? What can writers do?
Shadow Man - Melissa Scott (5 genders)The one thought I remember from this panel was that a lot of the people coming from the writing perspective seemed to have a lot of second-guessing built up around whether they should do an identity other their own at all if they weren't confident they'd do it correctly. Aaron L. very kindly volunteered himself as a possible fact-checker for trans issues, which was awfully generous of him. I think the other side of the solution may be what I was trying to remind myself of in that cryptic "seed -> book ->..." note -- that it's probably more helpful to the overall richness of the genre (and the social story-overhead as a whole) to write a compelling-but-ultimately-flawed attempt at exploring *any* kind of real or speculative difference that inspires someone else to come back with their own corrective vision than not to write that flawed book in the first place.
Elisabeth Bear (forthcoming book ________)
seed -> book -> seed -> book . . .
The Wild Swans - Peg Care?
* ask Jed for resource list
And at this point we reach what I'm with all due melodrama calling My Downfall: the Strange Horizons tea party. Don't get me wrong -- I had a great time setting things up and hawking the wares and delivering my (entirely sincere) patter about how great I think the magazine is, both as a product and as a project, to anyone who approached the table. It's just that in doing so I used up all but the last of my oh-so-unreliable extraversion. (I also missed Samuel Delany interviewing Joanna Russ; from everything I heard about that, I hope someone made a recording.) Regardless, it was great fun, and I got to meet a whole collection of people, some of whom were (to me) famous on the internets. And then I sat down.
The Guest of Honor speeches and awards ceremony were inspiring, but, of course, no notes. I bumped into Kat B. in the cheap seats, but she was even more overstimulated at that point than I was, and we mutually agreed to sit in companionable quiet.
The after-festivities socializing started out well enough: I had the best, most gracious and enlightening talking-with-an-author-about-a-story experience I could have imagined with Jenn Reese. Jenn was especially awesome because she managed all of that in the face of knowing that I'd had some problems with her story -- problems which she pretty neatly cleared up for me, all the while giving me other, more interesting things to think about. In sum: Jenn, you rule.
Apart from that, though, signs of my social overloading continued to drift in through the rest of that night. At the Carl Brandon Society/Speculative Literature Foundation/Bodies in Motion-launch joint party, I asked permission of Tempest (who I knew as an internet celebrity but not personally) to attach myself to her very entertaining conversations as an eavesdropper, which started out as a lot of fun. I think her theory about Murder, She Wrote is visionary and dead-on funny. But somehow I ended up literally backed into a corner while she had it out with this woman who was being strangely belligerent about television: she (other woman, not Tempest) kept saying "sex sells," so much so that once when she said it and I was waiting for her to make her point about it, she just stared at me for a while and said it again... what was really odd, though, was how she would say, "you're not the target audience" when referring to women, instead of, "we're not the target audience." Tempest's rejoinders were entertainingly pugnacious, but I wasn't really up for that kind of conflict, and I didn't really feel like I had the wherewithal to push out of the corner and leave. It's too bad, because when the CBS/SLF/BiM party finally broke up, I found out that a group of people I'd enjoyed glomming onto earlier had been having a conversation I *really* would have enjoyed being a part of. Eh, so it goes.
After meeting up with one of them, getting a bit of a recap of the topic and other bits of chatting and saying goodnight, I wandered back to my room -- but made the mistake of looking into the party suites on my way. I started to say just a brief hello to someone I'd met earlier in the day, and ended up stuck instead getting the rundown of someone else's adult financial life, which was, yes, moving, but a little difficult to take between 2:30 and 3:45 in the morning. I've got to learn how to interrupt people gracefully when they're monologuing so that I can, say, beg exhaustion and go to sleep.
~ Monday ~
I took no notes on Monday.
I did go to the first half of a panel on utopias, anti-utopias, and anti-anti-utopias (the point of the latter being to constuct a positive alternative vision of society that acknowledges its own warts -- this was one panel that did the definitional dance very well). There was a lot of referencing Octavia Butler as a writer of the latter two of those kinds of stories, and the panel reminded my that I really should write up some kind of essay about the commonalities and tensions between Butler's Dawn (the first book in Lillith's Brood) and Sherri Tepper's Raising the Stones, two books that have come up more than average in my conversations about books in the past couple of years.
The topic was just starting to warm up into something promising when I left, but I'd decided at the shapeshifting panel to check out an academic paper ("These Were the Smallest Boobs They Had: Gender Performance on a Massively Multi-player Online Game") that someone there was presenting at the same time as the utopias panel -- my one experiment with trying to cover two of the multiple tracks of programming at once. It worked passably well, but I probably won't try to have my cake and eat it in the future.
After that, it pretty much came to packing up and clearing out. There was some wandering around, eating, talking. I finally got to sit down and talk with one person I'd been catching at inconvenient moments all weekend until then. I was grateful for having borrowed Bird's Scooby-Doo suitcase instead of a larger one, given how long I was a nomad between checking out of the room and my flight. The suitcase did not, as Bird's mother had predicted, make me "the King of WisCon," but it was a good conversation piece, which was a help to my tired brain; one person even asked to have his picture taken with it. On the flight out of Madison, it was just barely small enough to fit under the seat of the little prop plane when all the overhead bins filled up and overflowed. Getting onto my next flight in St. Louis, I overheard someone in front of me lamenting that he'd packed his ibuprofin in checked luggage, and I was able to get some quick for him out of my own suitcase, prompting him to say, "thank you very much. Or, as we Scoobies like to say, rrankyou wrrerry ruch!" So, goodwill all around, and then safe home.
