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2006-06-01T01:42:15Z

141.155.108.126:

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Who Wants a Revolution? Will a Reform Do? (WisCon 30 Panels)

2006-06-01T01:32:24Z

141.155.108.126:

laura: [...]

ian: for me to be here as a black man... it's something we can't go back from. i don't think. not so easily as we seem to have gone back in feminism

joe: wto in seattle started out protesting etc thinking no big deal really but after 4 days of being gassed and clubbed my perspective changed completely. i think when revolution happens you can't predict your response to it. you get caught up in it.

ian: ... something about seattle wto etc

laura: have not learned a lot about revolutioin from sf. but maybe from Kim Stanley Robinson's mars trilogy. when they destroyed the shoot to the moon i'm curious if there is more about revolution in sf

patrick : not really very much... sf tends to... [] revolutionary in much more simple way but to expand our consciousness... what we can get to. not good at actual process. sf does not have actual procedural recommendations we'd be in a different world.

woman from audience: .... []

susan: sf is in a way our religion and keeps us from exploding. that's true for me. makiing it very very clear for me that i don't want to be in a revolution or a catastrophic scale of change.

[i think that's b/c she has something to lose]

joe: martha ward. gw bush. same char. they antagonize people from looking around,

guy wth pink hair and beard... contingent focus point, circumstance develop and things happen. revolution and sustained change. it would not do any good if a bunch of folks took out the white house and executed the ruling elite. b/c in a few weeks a new set would be ushered into place. culturally the us is not prepared, not ready, to have a society different from what it has now. if we got the revolution, it would not last.

laura: i agree but don't agree at all b/c I heard the SAME words from people about apartheid and about black people in SA not being "ready" or "capable" to run htings. and there are problems in SA but they have a very progressive constitution, etc

lenny: the underlying conditions that allowed that to take palce would not be removed. we have to remove the infection but also change the underlying conditions. we have let these people take power.

laura: question... yes, a paradigm shift but that may not work if they steal the ballots, if they maintain control in every conceivable way. i am not confident whether at this point we CAN...

lenny: getting the media to do their job

patrick : i think the media is the problem there has always been a thuggish business class the present media is morally feckless and corrupt. Decadent, meretricious, "human beings"...

[audience cheer!]

susan: well they kept saying how liberal the media was

patrick: this was a great piece of mau mauing. i popped my cork recently.. over this thing on slate... vic weissberg, editor... hilary clinton... interview of what's on her ipod. his entire article was about how her beatles and rolling stones are evidence that she is weaselly... wtf somenoen who went to college in 1972 likes the beatles and aretha franklin? big surprise!

audience: guy with grey hair and beart and glasses in front row: the problem with the media is like everyone else in this world we have ruules and conventions by which we operate. most businesses are part of a larger structure...

patrick: and how did we get to the ...

bearded guy: let me finish. the problem is... the repulicans hav learned to subvert them. i'll tell you exactly what it is . The talking point.

[jesus.. the testosterone in here...]

patrick: can I finish,

bearded due: Let me finish. [something about reporters and their talking points]. you almost have to view them like the soviets. you knew that everyone in the soviet power structure ...

other guy: the republicans haven't ... [something]

patrick: well i wan't thinking of wisconsin public television as the ...

guy: I'll tell you exactly what i think the problem is is, at one time in our country you have ... obviously partisan presses... but at some point we started getting into the idea of this one quote unquote objective voice.

laura tries to put a lid on it... guy keeps talking right over her. oh man .. i might as well be teleported into the comments thread of daily kos. hello did we forget the "feminist" as well as the "sf" partof this panel? overbearing dudes need to shut up a bit

woman in audience with feathered hat: revolution...

ian: most revolutions happen when things start getting a little bit better after a long slow downturn,. ideas... what it is they're fighting for. for example responsible nonmonogamy as a lifestyle, mostly started by sf fans. who read about it in sf. and then it moved out into the larger culture. it was something people did but not that they talked about or thought carefully about. whether they were so well written... or treated women very well... *laughter*

quilter: you are talking about heinlein?

*laughter

woman with ponytail in back: revolution in us now: gay marriage. knocking on doors... passionate about it.. in wisconisn. that's not where the real battle is. it's not the physical battle it's aesthetic.

patrick: .... people consider the dmo party... 50 state strategy. raising and spending money

another guy in audience: I'll tell you exactly what the problem is . the media keeps exacerbating divisions and turns us into mobs against each other.

[what? some other dude just said the opposite, that everyone says the same thing... and everyone agreed with that and now everyone is agreeing with this new guys]

patrick : We have to make a point of telling them what a fossilized pieces of shit they are, has a point to appeal to any last withered vestige of human decency they have.

laura: wait, wait, wait.. what is the solution? revolution? if the problem is the media, then what is the solution? what is revolution look like ? we must own the media.
so, let's have a quick round from the audience and then more panel discussion.

john, in audience: moderates vs. extremes. do we play to moderates or extremes?

pink hair guy: in many mentions of revolution there are assumptins it is violent revolution or physical overthrow. a cultural revolution that's slower than taking up arms and burning down centers of power... you can reach out to people you know, talk to them. call your coworkers on their shit. challenge people in everyday life.

[hmm sounds like 'reform' to me]

guy in back: 30 years ago we brought them down [what??] 20 years ago we said yessuh massa [wtf] and... to what happened at el mozote. as in that richard vigory article that patrick linked to... no longer come up with talking point. [...]

laura: i'd like to hear from some of the women.

guy in front: what about blogging, what do we see the media enacting? does the stuff hapening in blogging need to happen in the mainstream?

patrick: what would moving to the mainstream MEAN?

guy in front: there's a large number of people online... and the largest people are white collar workers.. how do you get blogs to everyone... blue collar workers...

laura: radio.

womn in front: pornography.

laura: radio is something people who work with their hands can listen to. media and commercialization.

woman in black velvet hat in back: maybe this is obvious but hasn't been said. The way things are not, is VIOLENT. children don't have health care... people's livelihood taken away from them... that's violence.

guy about the el mozote: But, people don't see that as violence.

me: but it is.

cynthia white: well... this is a strategizing question...

susan: how to make people see. "[[The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas]]"

el mozote guy: can you make people see that the poor are us, rather than, they are the poor.

laura: tv showed the images about vietnam and people hurt and dying. and yet a huge amoujnt of people voted bush after seeing abu ghraib.

susan: well,

lenny: well the problem is, I'll tell you,

laura: i want to hear susan.

susan: people don't seem to see it or know it. 14 million...

lenny: how many people in this room write letters to newspapers and tv stations. we need to let them know there's things we don't like. because they care about that.

laura: it's a little bit more efffective in my opinon than voting.

patrick. you can shame people who have been toadies a little bit. and even a little bit is a plus.

woman in pirate hat: american mindset is that your primary motive is self-interest. (is that anna from italy/london?) you need to change that so their motivation; is moral.

laura: that's so true it's shaping the vision of what's going on.

larra clark: i'm a librarian.... we see fox and cnn... letters to the editor is effective... it has a voice. but people have to engage the media in a very active way. just like with politics we need to engage in a veyr active way. rather than giving up and calling it crap. i don't watch tv, it's not for me and i don't care about it.

laura: creating media i totally see, but what would engaging mean?

larra: avenue and outlets for it. community radio station, look for ways to talk to other people, media as a way to talk to people. chicago, ney, la than if you're in another community we have an obligation to engage. it's a struggle. if we don't our voices will never be heard.

patrick you're exactly right and i don't want to overstate...and you've been very polite,.... and blogging is effective. political blogging makes them defensive. they read it. they pay attention to it:

michael, in front row: child death. problem isn't i see it is that people dont know... they don't care. it's what anna said about self-interest. Reagan made the poor into the enemy.

woman in middle: people at work... no sense of shame. no sense of public property. i've talked to people who didn't know that libraries belong to the public.

avedon : national health service... people here think it's bad.. but it's not... what's bad is losing your health b/c you can't afford it

laura: there's been a structured attempt to degrade the quality of public media and the spread of public information.

ian: revolutions... quote from goebbels, if you repeat a lie often enough it becomes the truth. pick a revolution. civil rights movement. mlk didn't create the bus boycott. rosa parks not an individual, community efforts... figurehead to be sacrificed in case it went badly... hundreds of hours of people volunteering... to make that bus boycott work. when i look at what made seattle effective, was new tactics. decentralization. they weren't able to stop the activists b/c there wasn't a top. it was affinity groups.

laura: that's how we took over the streets in san francisco... we had affinity groups. i had friends [post-panel accuracy check: "friends with family"] in iraq who said that they didn't think america cared but when they saw that san francisco was shut down they had some hope:

ian: quote from [[Upton Sinclair]]

lenny: take the time to call the media

arthur (bearded guy in front)

john: to bring this over to sf. who do you direct your political sf to? and what do you pick to try to change their minds. central vs. radical? we have to speak to red states in the same way that... we have to have ... i don't like the term moderate b/c your way is still there but you have to speak in a way that is understandable...

laura: susan take that.

susan: i'm a democratic organizer in addition to a doctor and sf fan. people who live there should speak to their neighbors and friends. i don't want south dakota to have banned abortion. if you don't want things to get worse... we can't have a one party system. it's important we work to get back one or two of the four institutions so there is some difference. even if you don't see the dems and repubs as very diff

lenny: how many people read atrios/ eschaton... in 10 most important congressional lists. buttons where you can donate. we have to start doing things like that.

arthur: everyone should read dan froomkins's column in the wash post. blog, nytimes, all on equal footing there. based upon the significance of it... they all get equal weight. all sorts of diff voices

cynthia white: in terms of media forums. you can put pressure on your local tv stations. if they don't show a production that's broadcast nationally... tyou can organize write-ins to tv stations. i have conflicted feelings about oprah. she's been doing stuff around poverty in the us... she focuses on individual solutions. but she does talk about health care, minimum wage... i wish she were more collective. i wish i could push her a little bit more to the left. and she goes into the red states.

woman in back: i'm frustrated b/c we keep focusing on media, government. what about the dollars. what about business. sf, and relationship btwn who we see as bad guys based on reading sf.

more...

quilter recomends good book by [[Illicit Passages]] by [[Alice Nunn]], Australian writer: turnkey girl, ... and anna... very good...

girl in white frilly outfit; civli rights movement, xtian church acted in significant way. when most of us think of xtian churches we hardly think of anything positive. hijacking of symbols. it's not a charismatic leader, it's... license plate for wildlife was eagle with flag. but now that looks like a gun-owner-rights right wing thing.

ian: left has to do a better job at dealing with strategic alliances. rightt wing pulled those feminist out of their fucking minds to coopt them for anti-pornography movement. that gave them power b/c they have formed an alliance.

patrick: are you suggesting that if we have an anti-iraq war demonstration, that we shut the fuck up about mumia:

ian: yes, but. BUT.

lenny: write letters to the paper.

avedon: let's not foget what republican did -- think tanks. not even think tanks they are propaganda strategy machines. throwing money at them. at building

patrick: youth thing — you can get an easy career in being a professional conservative as long as you are wiilling to spend your life spouting right wing talking points

avedon: where is the left wing equivalent

patrick there is no money in being a left wing activist/pundit... [or was that avedon?]

laura: how do we know if what we're doing is the right thning and when it's time to focus on small local elections... and...

me: how do we know when it's time for revolution?

laura: yeah how do we know when it's time for revolution?

woman in middle: people on left have missed the boat in villifying business. small business in particular. what is number one issue.

avedon: you think it's us who missed the boat, you're wrong. it's them. we've been saying it. they missed the boat. they need to help us.

patrick: small businesses... worst bunch of pampered sissies...!!! every politician pandering to them...

woman in black velvet hat: it's people getting together and acting together that will make that change. to stop that violence that's been happening. i operate by the ethic of least harm.

kathleen: i dont know where you live but where i live hundreds of thousands of people ... took to streets, left jobs and school... immigration.

allen baum: i'm not hearing the long term strategizing... the left has money.l..

laura: summary

* strategic long term thinking
* contribute to media, write, respond to things wrong right away.
* elections, where will make difference
* blogging and creating own media
* general strike
* build coalitions
* win culture wars on the moderates, not focus on the extremes and individual red state races
* universal health care, will make real difference in people's lives
* calling people on their bullshit
* convincing middle class doing to its employees what GM has done will continue happening
* celebrate success when we get it
* health care again. keeps people from taking risks. protecting themselves.
* read, stay informed, think about what you're reading so you can recognize a good colaition where you see one
* talk. get the radios back
* vote with dollars . like really.
* put your money into businesses that have political
* sense of humor rather than getting angry
* try and show and help peole to do critical thinking.
* if you have a 401 k, check and make sure you're not investing in something horrible
* support long attention spans....

laura: we have a right to health care, we do not have a right to health insurance.

Who Wants a Revolution? Will a Reform Do? (WisCon 30 Panels)

2006-06-01T01:23:01Z

141.155.108.126: typos & formatting

laura: [...]

ian: for me to be here as a black man... it's something we can't go back from. i don't think. not so easily as we seem to have gone back in feminism

joe: wto in seattle started out protesting etc thinking no big deal really b ut after 4 days of being gassed and clubbed my perspective changed completely. i think when revolution happens you can't predict your response to it. you get caught up in it.

ian: ... something about seattle wto etc

laura: have not learned a lot about revolutioin from sf. but maybe from Kim Stanley Robinson's mars trilogy. when they destroyed the shoot to the moon i'm curious if there is more about revolution in sf

patrick : not really very much... sf tends to... [] revolutionary in much more simple way but to expand our consciousness... what we can get to. not good act actual process. sf does not have actual procedural recommendations we'd be in a differnt word.

woman from audience: .... []

susan: sf is in a way our religion and keeps us from exploding. that's true for me. makiing it very very clear for me that i don't want to be in a revolution or a catastrophic scale of change.

[i think that's b/c she has something to lose]

joe: martha ward. gw bush. same char. they antagonize people from looking around,

guy wth pink hair and beard... contingent focus point, circumstance develop and things happen. revolution and sustained change. it would not do any good if a bunch of folks took out the white house and executed the ruling elite. b/c in a few weeks a new set would be ushered into place. culturally the us is not prepared, not ready, to have a society different from what it has now. if we got the revolution, it would not last.

laura: i agree but don't agree at all b/c I heard the SAME words from people about apartheid and about black people in SA not being "ready" or "capable" to run htings. and there are problems in SA but they have a very progressive constitution, etc

lenny: the underlying conditions that allowed that to take palce would not be removed. we have to remove the infection but also change the underlying conditions. we have let these people take power.

laura: question... yes, a paradigm shift but that may not work if they steal the ballots, if they maintain control in every conceivable way. i am not confident whether at this point we CAN...

lenny: getting the media to do their job

patrick : i think the media is the problem there has always been a thuggish busines class the present media is morally feckless and corrupt. Decadent, meretricious, "human beings"...

[audience cheer!]

susan: well they kept saying how liberal the media was

patrick: this was a great piece of mau mauing. i popped my cork recently.. over this thing on slate... vic weissberg, editor... hilary clinton... interview of what's on her ipod. his entire article was about how her beatles and rolling stones are evidence that she is weaselly... wtf somenoen who went to college in 1972 likes the beatles and aretha franklin? big surprise!

audience: guy with grey hair and beart and glasses in front row: the problem with the media is like everyone else in this world we have ruules and conventions by which we operate. most businesses are part of a larger structure...

patrick: and how did we get to the ...

bearded guy: let me finish. the problem is... the repulicans hav learned to subverte them.. i'll tell you exaclty what it is . The talking point.

[jesus.. the testosterone in here...]

patrick: can I finish,

bearded due: Let me finish. [something about reporters and their talking points]. you almost have to view them like the soviets. you knew that everyone in the soviet power structure ...

other guy: the republicans haven't ... [something]

patrick: well i wan't thinking of wisconsin public television as the ...

guy: I'll tell you exactly what i think the problem is is, at one time in our country you have ... obviously partisan presses... but at some point we started getting into the idea of this one quote unquote objective voice.

laura tries to put a lid on it... guy keeps talking right over her. oh man .. i might as well be teleported into the comments thread of daily kos. hello did we forget the "feminist" as well as the "sf" partof this panel? overbearing dudes need to shut up a bit

woman in audience with feathered hat: revolution...

ian: most revolutions happen when things start getting a little bit better after a long slow downturn,. ideas... what it is they're fighting for. for example responsible nonmonogamy as a lifestyle, mostly started by sf fans. who read about it in sf. and then it moved out into the larger culture. it was somehting people did but not that they talked aboutr or thougt carefully about. whtehr they were so well written... or treated women very well... *laughter*

quilter: you are talking about heinlein?

*laughter

woman with ponytial in back: revolution in us noew: gay marriage. knocking on doors... passionate about it.. in wisconisn. that's not where the real battle is. it's not the physical battle it's aesthetic.

patrick: .... people consider the dmo party... 50 state strategy. raising and spending money

another guy in audience: I'll tell you exactly what the problem is . the media keeps exacerbating divisions and turns us into mobs against each other.

[what? some other dude just said the opposite, that eveyrone says the same thing... and everyone agreed with that and now weveryone is agreeing with this new guys]

patrick : We have to make a point of telling them what a fossilized pieces of shit they are, has a point to appeal to any last withered vestige of human decency they have.

laura: wait, wait, wait.. what is the solution? revolution? if the problem is the media, then what is the solution? what is revolution look like ? we must own the media.
so, let's have a quick round from the audience and then more panel discussion.

john, in audience: moderates vs. extremes. do we play to moderates or extremes?

pink hair guy: in many mentions of revolution there are assumptins it is violent revolution or physical overthrow. a cultural revolution that's slower than taking up arms and burning down centers of pwoer... you can reach out to people you know, talk to them. call your coworkers on their shit. challenge people in everyday life.

[hmm sounds like 'reform' to me]

guy in back: 30 years ago we b roughtthem down [what??] 20 years ago we said yessuh massa [wtf] and... to what happened at el mozote. as in that richard vigory article that patrick linked to... no longer come up with talking point. [...]

laura: i'd like to hear from some of the women.

guy in front: what about blogging, what do we see the media enacting? does the stuff hapening in blogging need to happen in the mainstream?

patrick: what would moving to the mainstream MEAN?

guy in front: theres a large number of people online... and the largest people are white collar workers.. how do you get blogs to everyone... blue collar workers...

laura: radio.

womn in front: pornography.

laura: radio is something people who work with their hands can listen to. media and commercialiszation.

woman in black velvet hat in back: maybe this is obvious but hasn't been said. The way things are not, is VIOLENT. children don't have health care... people's livelihood taken away from them... that' sviolence.

guy about the el mozote: But, peopel don't see that as violence.

me: but it is.

cynthia white: well... this is a strategizing question...

susan: how to make people see. ones who walked away from omelas

el mozote guy: can you make people see that the poor are us, rather than, they are the poor.

laura: tv showed the images about vietnam and people hurt and dying. and yet a huge amoujnt of people voted bush after seeing abu ghraib.

susan: well,

lenny: well the problem is, I'll tell you,

laura: i want to hear susan.

susan: people don't seem to see it or know it. 14 million...

lenny: how many people in this room write letters to newspapers and tv stations. we need to let them know there's things we don't like. because they care about that.

laura: it's a little bit more efffective in my opinon than voting.

patrick. you can shame people who have been toadies a little bit. and even a little bit is a plus.

woman in pirate hat: american mindset is that your primary motive is self-interest. (is that anna from italy/london?) you need to change that so their motivation; is moral.

laura: that's so true it's shaping the vision of what's going on.

larra clark: i'm a librarian.... we see fox and cnn... letters to the editor is effective... it has a voice. but people have to engage the media in a very active way. just like with politics we need to engage in a veyr active way. rather than giving up and calling it crap. i don't watch tv, it's not for me and i don't care about it.

laura: creating media i totally see, but what would engaging mean?

larra: avenue and outlets for it. community radio station, look for ways to talk to other people, media as a way to talk to peoing. chicago, ney, la than if you're in a nother community we have an obligation to engage. it's a struggle. if we don't our voices will never be h eard.

patrick you're extactly right and i dont want to overstate...and you've been very polite,.... and blogging is effective. political bloggin makes them defensive. they read it. they pay attentio to it:

michael, in front row: child death. problem isn't i see it is that people dont know... they don't care. it's what anna said about self-interest. Reagan made the poor into the enemy.

woman in middle: people at work... no sense of shame. no sense of public property. i've talked to people who didn't know that libraries belong to the public.

avedon : national health service... people here think it's bad.. but it's not... what's bad is losing your health b/c you can't afford it

laura: there's been a structured attempt to degrade the quality of public media and the spread of public information.

ian: revolutions... quote from goebbels, if you repeat a lie often enough it becomes the truth. pick a revolution. civil rights movement. mlk didn't create the bus boycott. rosa parks not an individual, community efforts... figurehead to be sacrificed in case it went badly... hundreds of hours of people volunteering... to make that bus boycott work. when i look at what made seattle effective, was new tactics. decentralizaation. they weren't able to stop the activists b/c there wasn't a top. it was affinity groups.

laura: that's how we took over the streets in san francisco... we had affinity groups. i had friends [post-panel accuracy check: "friends with family"] in iraq who said that they didn't think america cared but when they saw that san francisco was shut down they had some hope:

ian: quote from upton sinclair

lenny: take the time to call the media

arthur (bearded guy in front)

john: to bring this over to sf. who do you direct your political sf to? and what do you pick to try to change their minds. central vs. radical? we have to speak to red states in the same way that... we have to have ... i don't like the term moderate b/c your way is still there but you have to speak in a way that is understandable...

laura: susan take that.

susan: i'm a democratic organizer in addition to a doctor and sf fan. people who live there should speak to their neighbors and friends. i don't want south dakota to have banned abortion. if you don't want things to get worse... we can't have a one party system. it's important we work to get back one or two of the four institutions so there is some difference. even if you don't see the dems and repubs as very diff

lenny: how many people read atrios/ eschaton... in 10 most important congressional lists. buttons where you can donate. we have to start doing things like that.

arthur: everyone should read dan froomkins's column in the wash post. blog, nytimes, all on equal footing there. based upon the significance of it... they all get equal weight. all sorts of diff voices

cynthia white: in terms of media forums. you can put pressure on your local tv stations. if they don't show a production that's broadcast nationally... tyou can organize write-ins to tv statiosn. i have conflicted feelings about oprah. she's been doing stuff aroudn poverty in the us... she focuses on individual solutions. but she does talk about health care, minimum wage... i wish she were more collective. i wish i could push her a little bit more to the left. and she goes into the red states.

woman in back: i'm frustrated b/c we keep focusing on media, government. what about the dollars. what about business. sf, and relationship btwn who we see as bad guys based on reading sf.

more...

quilter recomends good book by [[Illicit Passages]] by [[Alice Nunn]], Australian writer: turnkey girl, ... and anna... very good...

girl in white frilly outfit; civli rights movement, xtian churce acted in significant way. when most of us think of xtian churches we hardly think of anything positive. hijakcing of symbols. it's not a charismatifc leader, it's... license plate for wildlife was eagle with flag. but now that looks like a gun-owner-rights right wing thing.

ian: left has to do a better job at dealing with strategic alliances. rt wing pulled those femininst out of their fucking minds to coopt them for anti-pornography movement. that gave them power b/c they have formed an alliance.

patrick: are you suggesting that if we have an anti-iraq war demostration, that we shut the fuck up about mumia:

ian: yes, but. BUT.

lenny: write letters to the paper.

avedon: let's not foget what republican did -- think tanks. not even think tanks they are propaganda strategy machines. throwing money at them. at building

patrick: youth thing — you can get an easy career in being a professional conservative as long as you are wiilling to spend your life spouting right wing talkong points

avedon: wehre is the left wing equivalent

patrick there is no money in being a left wing activist/pundit... [or was that avedon?]

laura: how do we know if what we're doing is the right thning and when it's time to focus on small local elections... and...

me: how do we know when it's time for revolution?

laura: yeah how do we know when it's time for revolution?

woman in middle: people on left have missed the boat in villifying business. small business in particular. what is number one issue.

avedon: you think it's us who missed the boat, you're wrong. it's them. we've been saying it. they missed the boat. they need to help us.

patrick: small businesses... worst bunch of pampered sissies...!!! every politician pandering to them...

woman in black velvet hat: it's people getting together and acting together that will make that change. to stop that violence that's been happening. i operate by the ethic of least harm.

kathleen: i dont know where you live but where i live hundreds of thousands of people ... took to streets, left jobs and school... immigration.

allen baum: i'm not hearing the long term strategizing... the left has money.l..

laura: summary

* strategic long term thinking
* contribute to media, write, respond to things wrong right away.
* elections, where will make difference
* blogging and creating own media
* general strike
* build coalitions
* win culture wars on the moderates, not focus on the extremes and individual red state races
* universal health care, will make real difference in people's lives
* calling people on their bullshit
* convincing middle class doing to its employees what GM has done will continue happening
* celebrate success when we get it
* health care again. keeps people from taking risks. protecting themselves.
* read, stay informed, think about what you're reading so you can recognize a good colaition where you see one
* talk. get the radios back
* vote with dollars . like really.
* put your money into businesses that have political
* sense of humor rather than getting angry
* try and show and help peole to do critical thinking.
* if you have a 401 k, check and make sure you're not investing in something horrible
* support long attention spans....

laura: we have a right to health care, we do not have a right to health insurance.

Who Wants a Revolution? Will a Reform Do? (WisCon 30 Panels)

2006-06-01T01:22:12Z

141.155.108.126: typos

laura: [...]

ian: for me to be here as a black man... it's something we can't go back from. i don't think. not so easily as we seem to have gone back in feminism

joe: wto in seattle started out protesting etc thinking no big deal really b ut after 4 days of being gassed and clubbed my perspective changed completely. i think when revolution happens you can't predict your response to it. you get caught up in it.

ian: ... something about seattle wto etc

laura: have not learned a lot about revolutioin from sf. but maybe from Kim Stanley Robinson's mars trilogy. when they destroyed the shoot to the moon i'm curious if there is more about revolution in sf

patrick : not really very much... sf tends to... [] revolutionary in much more simple way but to expand our consciousness... what we can get to. not good act actual process. sf does not have actual procedural recommendations we'd be in a differnt word.

woman from audience: .... []

susan: sf is in a way our religion and keeps us from exploding. that's true for me. makiing it very very clear for me that i don't want to be in a revolution or a catastrophic scale of change.

[i think that's b/c she has something to lose]

joe: martha ward. gw bush. same char. they antagonize people from looking around,

guy wth pink hair and beard... contingent focus point, circumstance develop and things happen. revolution and sustained change. it would not do any good if a bunch of folks took out the white house and executed the ruling elite. b/c in a few weeks a new set would be ushered into place. culturally the us is not prepared, not ready, to have a society different from what it has now. if we got the revolution, it would not last.

laura: i agree but don't agree at all b/c I heard the SAME words from people about apartheid and about black people in SA not being "ready" or "capable" to run htings. and there are problems in SA but they have a very progressive constitution, etc

lenny: the underlying conditions that allowed that to take palce would not be removed. we have to remove the infection but also change the underlying conditions. we have let these people take power.

laura: question... yes, a paradigm shift but that may not work if they steal the ballots, if they maintain control in every conceivable way. i am not confident whether at this point we CAN...

lenny: getting the media to do their job

patrick : i think the media is the problem there has always been a thuggish busines class the present media is morally feckless and corrupt. Decadent, meretricious, "human beings"...

[audience cheer!]

susan: well they kept saying how liberal the media was

patrick: this was a great piece of mau mauing. i popped my cork recently.. over this thing on slate... vic weissberg, editor... hilary clinton... interview of what's on her ipod. his entire article was about how her beatles and rolling stones are evidence that she is weaselly... wtf somenoen who went to college in 1972 likes the beatles and aretha franklin? big surprise!

audience: guy with grey hair and beart and glasses in front row: the problem with the media is like everyone else in this world we have ruules and conventions by which we operate. most businesses are part of a larger structure...

patrick: and how did we get to the ...

bearded guy: let me finish. the problem is... the repulicans hav learned to subverte them.. i'll tell you exaclty what it is . The talking point.

[jesus.. the testosterone in here...]

patrick: can I finish,

bearded due: Let me finish. [something about reporters and their talking points]. you almost have to view them like the soviets. you knew that everyone in the soviet power structure ...

other guy: the republicans haven't ... [something]

patrick: well i wan't thinking of wisconsin public television as the ...

guy: I'll tell you exactly what i think the problem is is, at one time in our country you have ... obviously partisan presses... but at some point we started getting into the idea of this one quote unquote objective voice.

laura tries to put a lid on it... guy keeps talking right over her. oh man .. i might as well be teleported into the comments thread of daily kos. hello did we forget the "feminist" as well as the "sf" partof this panel? overbearing dudes need to shut up a bit

woman in audience with feathered hat: revolution...

ian: most revolutions happen when things start getting a little bit better after a long slow downturn,. ideas... what it is they're fighting for. for example responsible nonmonogamy as a lifestyle, mostly started by sf fans. who read about it in sf. and then it moved out into the larger culture. it was somehting people did but not that they talked aboutr or thougt carefully about. whtehr they were so well written... or treated women very well... *laughter*

quilter: you are talking about heinlein?

*laughter

woman with ponytial in back: revolution in us noew: gay marriage. knocking on doors... passionate about it.. in wisconisn. that's not where the real battle is. it's not the physical battle it's aesthetic.

patrick: .... people consider the dmo party... 50 state strategy. raising and spending money

another guy in audience: I'll tell you exactly what the problem is . the media keeps exacerbating divisions and turns us into mobs against each other.

[what? some other dude just said the opposite, that eveyrone says the same thing... and everyone agreed with that and now weveryone is agreeing with this new guys]

patrick : We have to make a point of telling them what a fossilized pieces of shit they are, has a point to appeal to any last withered vestige of human decency they have.

laura: wait, wait, wait.. what is the solution? revolution? if the problem is the media, then what is the solution? what is revolution look like ? we must own the media.
so, let's have a quick round from the audience and then more panel discussion.

john, in audience: moderates vs. extremes. do we play to moderates or extremes?

pink hair guy: in many mentions of revolution there are assumptins it is violent revolution or physical overthrow. a cultural revolution that's slower than taking up arms and burning down centers of pwoer... you can reach out to people you know, talk to them. call your coworkers on their shit. challenge people in everyday life.

[hmm sounds like 'reform' to me]

guy in back: 30 years ago we b roughtthem down [what??] 20 years ago we said yessuh massa [wtf] and... to what happened at el mozote. as in that richard vigory article that patrick linked to... no longer come up with talking point. [...]

laura: i'd like to hear from some of the women.

guy in front: what about blogging, what do we see the media enacting? does the stuff hapening in blogging need to happen in the mainstream?

patrick: what would moving to the mainstream MEAN?

guy in front: theres a large number of people online... and the largest people are white collar workers.. how do you get blogs to everyone... blue collar workers...

laura: radio.

womn in front: pornography.

laura: radio is something people who work with their hands can listen to. media and commercialiszation.

woman in black velvet hat in back: maybe this is obvious but hasn't been said. The way things are not, is VIOLENT. children don't have health care... people's livelihood taken away from them... that' sviolence.

guy about the el mozote: But, peopel don't see that as violence.

me: but it is.

cynthia white: well... this is a strategizing question...

susan: how to make people see. ones who walked away from omelas

el mozote guy: can you make people see that the poor are us, rather than, they are the poor.

laura: tv showed the images about vietnam and people hurt and dying. and yet a huge amoujnt of people voted bush after seeing abu ghraib.

susan: well,

lenny: well the problem is, I'll tell you,

laura: i want to hear susan.

susan: people don't seem to see it or know it. 14 million...

lenny: how many people in this room write letters to newspapers and tv stations. we need to let them know there's things we don't like. because they care about that.

laura: it's a little bit more efffective in my opinon than voting.

patrick. you can shame people who have been toadies a little bit. and even a little bit is a plus.

woman in pirate hat: american mindset is that your primary motive is self-interest. (is that anna from italy/london?) you need to change that so their motivation; is moral.

laura: that's so true it's shaping the vision of what's going on.

larra clark: i'm a librarian.... we see fox and cnn... letters to the editor is effective... it has a voice. but people have to engage the media in a very active way. just like with politics we need to engage in a veyr active way. rather than giving up and calling it crap. i don't watch tv, it's not for me and i don't care about it.

laura: creating media i totally see, but what would engaging mean?

larra: avenue and outlets for it. community radio station, look for ways to talk to other people, media as a way to talk to peoing. chicago, ney, la than if you're in a nother community we have an obligation to engage. it's a struggle. if we don't our voices will never be h eard.

patrick you're extactly right and i dont want to overstate...and you've been very polite,.... and blogging is effective. political bloggin makes them defensive. they read it. they pay attentio to it:

michael, in front row: child death. problem isn't i see it is that people dont know... they don't care. it's what anna said about self-interest. Reagan made the poor into the enemy.

woman in middle: people at work... no sense of shame. no sense of public property. i've talked to people who didn't know that libraries belong to the public.

avedon : national health service... people here think it's bad.. but it's not... what's bad is losing your health b/c you can't afford it

laura: there's been a structured attempt to degrade the quality of public media and the spread of public information.

ian: revolutions... quote from goebbels, if you repeat a lie often enough it becomes the truth. pick a revolution. civil rights movement. mlk didn't create the bus boycott. rosa parks not an individual, community efforts... figurehead to be sacrificed in case it went badly... hundreds of hours of people volunteering... to make that bus boycott work. when i look at what made seattle effective, was new tactics. decentralizaation. they weren't able to stop the activists b/c there wasn't a top. it was affinity groups.

laura: that's how we took over the streets in san francisco... we had affinity groups. i had friends [post-panel accuracy check: "friends with family"] in iraq who said that they didn't think america cared but when they saw that san francisco was shut down they had some hope:

ian: quote from upton sinclair

lenny: take the time to call the media

arthur (bearded guy in front)

john: to bring this over to sf. who do you direct your political sf to? and what do you pick to try to change their minds. central vs. radical? we have to speak to red states in the same way that... we have to have ... i don't like the term moderate b/c your way is still there but you have to speak in a way that is understandable...

laura: susan take that.

susan: i'm a democratic organizer in addition to a doctor and sf fan. people who live there should speak to their neighbors and friends. i don't want south dakota to have banned abortion. if you don't want things to get worse... we can't have a one party system. it's important we work to get back one or two of the four institutions so there is some difference. even if you don't see the dems and repubs as very diff

lenny: how many people read atrios/ eschaton... in 10 most important congressional lists. buttons where you can donate. we have to start doing things like that.

arthur: everyone should read dan froomkins's column in the wash post. blog, nytimes, all on equal footing there. based upon the significance of it... they all get equal weight. all sorts of diff voices

cynthia white: in terms of media forums. you can put pressure on your local tv stations. if they don't show a production that's broadcast nationally... tyou can organize write-ins to tv statiosn. i have conflicted feelings about oprah. she's been doing stuff aroudn poverty in the us... she focuses on individual solutions. but she does talk about health care, minimum wage... i wish she were more collective. i wish i could push her a little bit more to the left. and she goes into the red states.

woan in back: i'm frustrated b/c we keep focusing on media, government. what about the dollars. what about business. sf, and relationship btwn who we see as bad guys based on reading sf.

more...

quilter recomends good book by [[Illicit Passages]] by [[Alice Nunn]], Australian writer: turnkey girl, ... and anna... very good...

girl in white frilly outfit; civli rights movement, xtian churce acted in significant way. when most of us think of xtian churches we hardly think of anything positive. hijakcing of symbols. it's not a charismatifc leader, it's... license plate for wildlife was eagle with flag. but now that looks like a gun-owner-rights right wing thing.

ian: left has to do a better job at dealing with strategic alliances. rt wing pulled those femininst out of their fucking minds to coopt them for anti-pornography movement. that gave them power b/c they have formed an alliance.

patrick: are you suggesting that if we have an anti-iraq war demostration, that we shut the fuck up about mumia:

ian: yes, but. BUT.

lenny: write letters to the paper.

avedon: let's not foget what republican did -- think tanks. not even think tanks they are propaganda strategy machines. throwing money at them. at building

patrick: youth thing — you can get an easy career in being a professional conservative as long as you are wiilling to spend your life spouting right wing talkong points

avedon: wehre is the left wing equivalent

patrick there is no money in being a left wing activist/pundit... [or was that avedon?]

laura: how do we know if what we're doing is the right thning and when it's time to focus on small local elections... and...

me: how do we know when it's time for revolution?

laura: yeah how do we know when it's time for revolution?

woman in middle: people on left have missed the boat in villifying business. small business in particular. what is number one issue.

avedon: you think it's us who missed the boat, you're wrong. it's them. we've been saying it. they missed the boat. they need to help us.

patrick: small businesses... worst bunch of pampered sissies...!!! every politician pandering to them...

woman in black velvet hat: it's people getting together and acting together that will make that change. to stop that violence that's been happening. i operate by the ethic of least harm.

kathleen: i dont know where you live but where i live hundreds of thousands of people ... took to streets, left jobs and school... immigration.

allen baum: i'm not hearing the long term strategizing... the left has money.l..

laura: summary

* strategic long term thinking
* contribute to media, write, respond to things wrong right away.
* elections, where will make difference
* blogging and creating own media
* general strike
* build coalitions
* win culture wars on the moderates, not focus on the extremes and individual red state races
* universal health care, will make real difference in people's lives
* calling people on their bullshit
* convincing middle class doing to its employees what GM has done will continue happening
* celebrate success when we get it
* health care again. keeps people from taking risks. protecting themselves.
* read, stay informed, think about what you're reading so you can recognize a good colaition where you see one
* talk. get the radios back
* vote with dollars . like really.
* put your money into businesses that have political
* sense of humor rather than getting angry
* try and show and help peole to do critical thinking.
* if you have a 401 k, check and make sure you're not investing in something horrible
* support long attention spans....

laura: we have a right to health care, we do not have a right to health insurance.

Template:PartialTranscript

2006-06-01T01:09:04Z

141.155.108.126:

''This is a draft of a transcript. Ellipses (...) indicate missing text;''
''question marks (?) indicate unknown speakers; ''
''and there could be plenty of unmarked errors. ''
''Other attendees are encouraged to incorporate their own ''
''notes and descriptions of actions (applause, laughter, etc.) into the transcript. ''
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Help:QuickCheatSheet

2006-06-01T00:49:35Z

141.155.108.126:

Template:PartialTranscript

2006-06-01T00:48:17Z

141.155.108.126:

''This is a draft of a transcript. Ellipses (...) indicate missing text;
question marks (?) indicate unknown speakers;
and there could be plenty of unmarked errors.
Other attendees are encouraged to incorporate their own
notes and descriptions of actions (applause, laughter, etc.) into the transcript.
External links, recordings, and the like can also be linked.''

Is Reading Feminist SF a Theory Building Activity? (WisCon 30 Panel)

2006-06-01T00:47:34Z

141.155.108.126: /* Transcript Notes */

==Panelists==

[[Karen Joy Fowler]] (moderator), [[Margaret McBride]], [[Lori Selke]], [[Joan Haran]], [[Cheryl Morgan]]

==Transcript Notes==

{{FillerNeeded}}

mod KJF: what brought you to sf & feminism

MM: subscription to science fiction book club as an adult.

LS: learned both sf & feminism at mother's knee; getting phd in chemical engineering while she was growing up. collision came when i read "when it changed" ... i was 18, 19, 20; an adult but not by much. that was the first joanna russ i ever read

JH: i also read sf & fantasy and all kinds of fantastic literatures as a child but once i went to college a sense of shame about that crept ... i continued to read fantasy. that makes no sense to me now. in early 90s i did a master's in gender studies. they gave us this very extensive reading list. this was my first encounter with feminism, was doing a master's in gender studies. one of the books was shulamith firestone's dialectic of sex. her thesis about taking reproduction outside the body seemed to me at that point incredibly attractive. the other thing she said was there was no utopian literature for women and i found that hard to believe. i thought that A) she was writing science fiction and B) there was other science fiction.

piercy & firestone, piercy & donna haraway

CM: introduction.

KJF: Watching [[James Tiptree, Jr. Award|Tiptree Award]] process several years & something has repeated itself several times. fresh jury begins discussing the kind of book they want, settles on the kind of book, the kind of experience they want. generally turns out they want to be reading [[The Left Hand of Darkness]] and want to be 19 years old. that's what they're trying to create. many many months and books later they begin to scale down their expectations and look for changes that are more subtle & have a less profound change in their thinking. i've seen this so many times that i've wondered -- at our age, and with our reading histories, is it in fact possible to have that experience again?

KJF: when was the last time a book really profoundly rocked you? how long ago was that? and what sorts of impacts do you find when you read now?

JH: sometimes reading a book doesn't have its impact on the first thing. i did work on starhawk. finally struck me that there was a male POV ... 1992, 93. the other text was ShadowMan - thinking about gender & sexuality, the way that melissa scott wrote about that, thrtu, embodying relationships made sense to me. that queer theory for example you can slip off the page when you read about something ... the bodily experience of those characters has done as well as it is in shadowman. that helped me to imagine myself and to imagine other others in a way that makes a lot more sense. so again roughly the same time. and there have been texts that approach that since then but i think that for me but part of it is having the time to go over and over a text, because i read fast, i'm plot-driven to start with, i have to know how the story turned out, and then i go back and read parts again that occur to me; i can't do that the first time b/c i read to fast. texts need to bear second, third, fourth, fifth readings to get rushes from them, to do theory-building. IMHO reading superficially one reading doesn't do that for me.

KJF: you said you came to these texts having nbeen taught to read for gender issues - would you say you've been trained to do that or is it a more natural way for you to approach a text.

JH: no it's efinitely training. my first degree was enligh shitory and the teaching was looking at a text in that context, and it was all class, come the revolution all will be solved, and gender was not an issue. like that point of my life like many women of a certain privilege i hadn't come across gender as a disadvantage, but then once i went into the workplace i realized oooohhh - things are different for girl. something about my social reality made it possible for me to realize reading differently - training - the other thing, in terms of theory building, it's not just about me reading the text, but about talking to other people about text, so it's not just about the text but about texts that can create conversations, and talking to other people who read differently, illuminates other stuff for me that i missed b/c of my own reading blinkers.

CM: one of the things that first struck me when i read the title is that sure reading is a feminist theory building activity but coming to wiscon is a really serious feminist theory building activity. in terms of recent books & things it's getting hard, this comes back to a panel we had yesterday: is feminist sf so five years ago. and to a certain extent we decided it was b/c things have changed. back when i was a teenager it was great to imagine a world with female pilots and presidents and fighter pilots and now all those things have happened. we haven't won the war but we're now fighting in the trenches not doing easy things like advancing across the land. but the type of book people can write now is different than the type of book people could write back in the 60s. plus when you're 19 it's easier to impress you with the big ideas & when you get older you get more sophisticated & ask more from a book. most of the books that have blown me away over past few years are literary style rather than content. probably river of gods by ian mcdonald b/c he introduces in that a character who has had a sex-change operation to become neuter; someone who elected to get out of the gender game altogether; and if you look at the book, it's all based on what actual transsexuals go thru, but rather than what someone goes thru mtf or ftm it's what somebody would go thru to have no gender at all.

LS: took a course in feminist theory in college taught by someone who was really really rigorous and i don't think then i've had that reaction to a story; b/c i'm hyper-critical, it's really hard to blow me away with a story; which is why i think we do it with a narrative to begin with rather than writing shulamith firestone - that's science fiction. narrative is to slip the ideas in and make you think wow and have it come up later but that doesn't work any more. John Kessel / Stories for Men. i read it as a book before it won the tiptree. for me it really did make me - it was the first sophisticated treatment of what it would be like for boys; the other side of a feminist utopia. it wasn't oh this would be horrible; it was hmm there are some sophisticated subtle effects. things i look for now yeah the big idea is great but what are some of the unintended consequences. and i can still be brought up short by that kind of book or story.

KJF: but less of a wow and more of a hmm.

LS: yeah but that's okay, i'm really suspicious of a wow; i'm really suspicious of things that are supposed to blow my mind or things that really did blow my mind b/c i tend to think i' being propagandized rather than really changing my thinking b/c i'm not being critical

MM: i teach freshmen in college; i'm still involved w/ the 19-year-olds. i'm teaching a class this time of juniors & seniors of all tiptree winners & hosrtlisted so getting a lot of that this time. but for my own personal reading it is a little more of the well that's an interesting question, hmm, where is that going to go and what would that do. so even if it's fairly subtle -- troll did some interesting things. i was on that jury. and troll did some interesting things for me as did sea of trolls by nancy farmer. which is a YA and i hadn't read a YA which was doing -- it was very subtle yet still some interesting things. ... TROLL what made it work for me - a gay man in finland who finds a troll and for various reasons falls in lust ? with the troll. how much is your sexuality affected by what you don't want to do, how much of it is a dark thing going on, and what really made troll work for me is the philippino mail order bride, and mail order brides, even tho most of us would totally cringe, they're an accepted part of our society, and how do we juxtapose that with the fact that everyone is so concerned that he fell in lvoe with a troll. ... as long as it's doing the theordore sturgeon thing, at least making me ask some questions, i'm willing ...

KJF: joan talked about a kind of text that leaves room for the reader, a participatory sort of reading as opposed to a text that walks you thru it; i want to discuss & add to it something that lori just said -- i wonder if part of being a feminist sf reader is a kind of innately confrontational reading, a sort of -- instead of slipping right into a book and being willing to go wherever the writer takes you, is part of the way we read is a kind of prove it, show me, let me think about it first sort of reading? speak at will.

CM: i picked up on it when lori mentioend it as well and was wondering whether being less trusting of gosh wow was actually an artifact of changes in society as much of changes in us becoming more suspicious and things. back when i was a teenager there was only one source of news in the UK; the BBC; so actually having science fiction novels that said things that the BBC would never say was interesting & important. now these days we have a lot of media, different versions of the news; possibly that's making us more suspicious in our reading & less willing to accept gosh wow.

KJF: will point out now feminist news channel

JH: one of the things i was thinking about when i mentioned that point was i think for me some of it is about narrative strategies in terms of leaving a space. it's not necessarily that you are engaged in a one-to-one conversation with the narrator. i personally love narratives with multiple POVs where in the interstices the gaps and the kind of disruptions b/w different narrative POV characters where you can see the stuff that doesn't fit - example - just b/c i've been working with it, gwyneth jones' LIFE, the narrative works backwards & forwards b/w these two different women; one a passive-aggressive scientist and this sort of camille paglia type cypher. jones is using them to look at different aspects of feminism, so sometimes they work as real characters, and sometimes they are much more advancing a politics. but b/c she is giving you those different perspectives, and ... she's giving you as the reader multiple points of identification and also the opportunity to have either one and follow the narrative one way or the opportunity to move b/w those points of view & have a much more complicated way first time thru which i'm generally too stupid to do

CM: everyone's too stupid to read gwyneth's books

JH: no this is why i have to read books over again b/c i do suspend my disbelief and i do get fully embodied, embedded in one of the characters, and it needs me to read it again to get those kinds of differences. in starhawk novel i was talking about there are two main female POV characters and those were the only ones i could read the first several times i read the book; it was when i finally read it several times and heard the voice of that other character. sorry i'm not just kind of rambling.

KJF: life is a really copmlicated and interesting book and my first time thru it i had - there's a rape and another great injustice of another sort as well and i was so focused on expecting that to be resolved in some way, the perpetrator to be exposed, the woman to come to some sort of action, and just waited for that - so to me one of the interesting things about it was to think, okay, that's not a necessary part of the plotline any more. it seemed to me - i'm not saying this very clearly - it seemed to me in the end much more real & interesting that it didn't resolve in the ways i longed for it and waited for it too and left me with much more to think about b/c it didn't

MM: when i was thinking ... of what i did woith my students, that's what happens when they move from fiction to theory when they start to ask themselves what does this has to do with my life? where do i see the fiction playing out in the things that have to do with me. again i'm working with fairly young people who often have read no theory so how do we move from the fiction to theory and i gess what i'm thinking is that the two work together - theory gives you language & a way to approach a particular issue and the fiction can also give you language & metaphor and a way to approach a particular issue.

KJF: this raises something i've been thinking about in terms of this panel & my life. when i had that early experiecne that your students are still enjoying, the book swere very useful to me in terms of my own life. it's been hard. the kind of sexuality issues in particular about an aging woman which are for obvious reasons the kinds of things i'm interested in now it's very hard to find books about those kinds of things to find what i'm experiencing now. so along the same lines as when was the last time a book changed something for you i've also added when was a book really useful to me. when i was first married and reading all that feminist science fiction it was would change me so completely that i was utterly unfit to live in the real world, my husband would tiptoe around and say let me know when you've finished that book, and there would be a very painful process of readjusting. but maybe i just don't let it happen any more, maybe it was too painful.

LS: some people use books for escapist purposes. finding something that speaks your language and lets you go somewhere else is a good thing. i don't get that experience reading but i'm also a writer and i do get it writing and that's why i do it.

MM: these were painful. i'm thinking of [[Kate Wilhelm]]'s [[The Funeral]] - one of [[Harlan Ellison|Ellison]]'s anthologies, [[Dangerous Visions]], and it was just PAINFUL to read b/c it felt uncomfortably true. and some of the other ones too where, they were very important for me, but also so discouraging of what i thought was going on in my life and what i thought was going on around me - i don't want hopeful books exactly but i want to feel what can i do with this book or this story that somehow changes the way that i'm thinking, changes the world around me, or sees a potentail way -- LIFE did some of that for me, made me think about things in a different way; it's not exactly a hopeful book, but at least it's not totally a funeral of all is lost, all is gloom, and funeral was that way for me.

JH: can i say something

KJF: please do

JH: one of the reasons i liked [[Life]] and it brings me back to other books - one of gold coast books / pacific edge - thinking about utopia as something fully formed and complete is wrong thing to do; utopia is about struggle forever; and that seems to me the best description of utopia that i can imagine; and i think for me that's useful b/c it is about process & struggle & movement. it's not perfect by any manner or means but it's - some of the things that she's doing with that are really useful, and that idea, struggle forever - so i think hope, hope is about, i think, being able to take action; you don't know how it's going to turn out but you think you can do. novels or any kinds of texts that help you believe you can do things are really useful. books aren't just useful to me to think about stuff, they're to help me hold myself together; that's one of the reasons i read to hold myself together b/c sometimes the struggle forever is about too hard. it doesn't always have to be theory; it can be about speaking to you or parts of you in ways that other parts of the world don't.

CM: maybe i'm just old & cynical but i've gotten to the stage where nobody else is going to hold myself together but me and i read books for other reasons the style or whatever. they occasionally say interesting political things but i no longer expect solutions from them.

MM: but even if it's a light little touch that makes me go this story couldn't have been written 10 years ago - there's a very light-hearted story, kissing frogs, and it's a story where a person who is transgendering puts a want ad to meet somebody, and the story couldn't have been written, couldn't have been published, i think 20 years ago, and the fact that it can and even be listed for a tiptree makes me feel hopeful about the world.

KJF: what about it makes you think it couldn't have been published then?

MM: i don't think a character treated very lightly, very humorously, that's in the midst of transgendering -- could that have been published 20 or 25 years ago? a story that treats the whole concept of transgendering and going thru that so commonplacely that it's treated humorously, i don't think that could have been done.

CM: certainly there have been characters for a long time, angela carter, i think the point you're making is that the character is treated sympathetically.

MM: the author didn't have to do a lot of work; b/c audience accepted it; and i think that's a hopeful.

KJF: i think a theory is that perhaps i'm too cynical

LS: cynical

KJF: easy for me to forget how much progress really has been made since i was growing up then and now b/c in some ways the vision that i got from these books was a sort of all or nothing, either we win or we lose, and i've been very surprised in some ways by the focus on masculinity - something i've begun to hear a lot about. because in the 70s when i was first encountering this stuff & hearing about it it was very clear to me it was for both sexes; partly b/c i had children; very clear that the male role was oign to have to change for feminism to succeed the way i wanted it to. the shock of feminism that women would work outside the home & come home & do all the work there as well was not what i was envisioning. what i longed for was such a deep & profound change that it's hard for me to take the pleasure in things that perhaps i ought to take in the things we have accomplsiehd.

MM: at that point i needed to have my consciousness raised. i was a very young woman who had been raised in a very stereotypical world and i needed painful and needed the rug pulled out from under me. i actually had a young woman write to me who was 20 who had never thought much about gender. student who wrote to her @ 20 had never thought of gender. i was probably there at 20 as well. problems int he world. i'm willing to read the painful works occasionally but i want them to raise questions for me. fantasy & sf for me are to disrupt reality but not to break it down so much that it can't be built back up.

CM: a couple of things in this clearly as you get older there's a lack of willingness to change, you have more to lose, the job the family all that kind of stuff. i like to think i'm not like that possibly b/c i don't have much to lose, no job, not much social status ... but i think after you've thrown yourself enthusiastically in something for 30 or more years everything involves people and everything involves people involves politics & is struggle & won't work the way you thought it would.

JH: don't know if it was what i said about masculinity you were thinking nabout. when i was reading WOTEOT and firestone it wasn't that men had to change, but it was that they had to change the way way i thought they had to change.

KJF: and so they should

JH: but i want them to change how i want them, not the way you - i don't care about you - and fiction reminds me of other POVs that are useful. but i'm a bit suspicious of linear progress models of history but also of subjectivity identity or whatever. but i have to keep learning and forgetting the same lessons over and over again. and maybe this is one of my kind of things about re-reading. a lot of the talk on the panel has been about fiction as a progression and i think you're making interesting and real and valid points about things being made possible that weren't possible before but going back to stuff written in another period of time is still useful now is one of the ways that i do theory. stuff doesn't have to be novel to be useful. i'm going to stop there.

KJF: the always amazing UKL. the last time i read TLHOD a couple of years ago i had a different kind of thinking about it. part of which was to some extent it is literally true, and i can't defend this very well, and i would have to defend male and female in ways i am incapable of doing, but her aliens become male or become female depending on the outer stimulus that's provided at the time, and that's something that we fit ourselves in as well - something that i was taking purely as grounded & a thought experiment i can now take in a different way

MM: we need to keep this in print b/c there are still people coming up who are 20 who have never thought about gender & need the painful works.

vonda: MM said a little while ago that you weren't looking for hopeful books ; is it impossible for a hopeful book to pull the rug out for under you. (confusion about hearing im/possible)

LS & MM: oh yeah it's possible

VM: i get pages with 300 of abuse of women and with blurbs that say you'll love this book and i don't think people needed to write that book after suzy mckee charnas walk to the end of the world.

KJF: there's your blurb right there: "didn't need to be written; go read some suzy mckee charnas"

VM: 300 pages of wallowing in the abuse of women to prove that abuse of women is bad, which, duh. he kept pestering me; publisher said but you don't understand vonda the way you can tell the bad guys is that they're abusing women.

MM: i agree with you but there are people who haven't read suzy charnas but they might read something new. so i think there are still some reason for those books to be written.

VM: but shouldn't sf go beyond that and have some attention paid to it beyond that's a hopeful book & i'm too cynical to read it

CM: i think there are plenty of good books around; that's not an issue. but at the same time i think there are people who need to be shocked out of their complacency, realize they aren't as well off as i am.

LS: hope is great it's the actual -- rearrange my thinking doesn't happen, and if it were to happen i would have to realize that someone was snowing me, but hope -- pandora experience here are tons of things being thrown at you

KJF: I would turn that around and ask you suzy mckee charnas' book aside, is there a book without hope that could still be a valuable book or would that not be a helpful experience.

VM: a book without hope (stuttering)

KJF: i'm thinking that would be a great title

VM: you can write it

KJF: i can write it, i can read it, i can publish it

VM: i've had the experience of writing what i thought were hopeful books nad being told i'm not a feminist. "You're a feminist?" not serious ... maybe the light at the end of the tunnel, light shining on us for last 30 years, is having an effect

gavin: thinking of [[Laurie Marks]]' fantasy series, bad things happening to men and women, yet hope that people will live together - trying to get beyond the cynical thing.

VM: not trying to say there shouldn't be bad things happening or even drama or melodrama in a book, but the assumption taht bad things happen b/c you're female or a kid, i just with my own work i want to get beyond that.

CM: laurie's book are an excellent example - in them, people working hard on politics, trying to learn from each other; that's particularly helpful b/c someone learning what needs to be done.

aud: add to that short story series of matter of seggri; i found that to be very powerful & very hopeful

aud: theory-building - lots of different aspects. one of them is 19yo experience, getting in touch w/ inner 3yo and make you say "why" - book sthat get inside me and shake of my theoretical base are books that see something that i've never seen even tho it's right in front of me - for me gwyneth jones WHITE QUEEN & north ... did that for me

LS: troll did that for me. i can't articulate my response to troll in any meaningful way whatsoever but it did make me go hmm.

MM: i'm not sure i can say why but the first thing that came to my mind were the stories that retell fairy stories and that made me go hhhh-- why was that particular trope always there in the fairy tale and what happens when we come at it from another point of view

KJF: it's not a text so i don't know if it's a fair responsen to your question or not but i have been of course as many of us have been living in the US for the last several years and i've become very conscious of the whole war narrative, we're going to war, we've been attacked, and the tremendous power of that storyline, and my reaction has been very much, what an unnecessary part of the world war seems to me to be but how much the people who aren't actually going toff to do the fighting seems to thrill to that storyline. not so much of the war itself but over the power of that narrative.

CM: i think a lot of the really interesting stuff i've read of late has to do with state of world, gender politicds. thinking of short story that --? wrote about iraq war; about bulldozing iraqi soldiers alive in trenches.

aud: in terms of where is tarted as a feminist sf reader to do and where i look for and what i look for -- id idn't know vonda was there -- but i started with dreamsnake, and it struck me as a very humane, and it was incredibly helpful, and it was a young woman character taking action in her universe for change, in a very loving & assertive way, and that was earthshattering for me at the time. and here i am 25, 30 years later, and having studied women's studies in college, the world around me today has become a place where the % of things that i thought were movable issues compared with the % of things i thought were intractable and things i thought were given have completely changed. i used to believe early on, that everything was movable and changable, and some intractable and i didn't have a bead on them and then they'd be movable. and i sit here today and look at the world - touched by venom did a lot of controversy - and part of the story is that women are horribly treated, and is this news, and i don't think it's news, but the reality is you don't need a book to find it, it goes on in places of war, poverty, etc. so now i find myself not just a place of movable intracdtable etc but hopelessness b/c maybe given is a bigger % than i'd ever considered based on biology & nature of universe and that's what has me reading now for things like joan said holding myself together as a person, as opposed to wows, b/c i'm getting wows for the world, and i'm all for a hopeful telling, and i think laurie marks' is a very hopeful view of the universe, but that given is scary.

matt austern: congentical agenesis of gender ideation - a story i recently read that said something about gender i'd never seen before. the first story i'd seen that asked what kind of mind you'd have to have to not see gender beofre.

KJF: impact on me, b/c how had i not noticed the gradations, 2 sexes, 3, four, and then i read that book and think oh right it's 25 or 30. also thinking about flexibility of sexuality in that book/story

gavin: read john varley short stories i'd never erad before, amazed to find, closest person to have written kissing frog story in 1976 if tiptree wasn't doing things like that. john varley now seems to write heinleinian space opera for kids with some gender stuff but ...

CM: i haven't read JV's stories myself but 2-3 years ago we had a panel w/ transgender issues and the message i got was it was superficial

gavin: and yet you can't change the gender of the charadcter even superficially without changing expectations of reader etc b/c you don't know waht author intended

gavin: another thing is there much of gender stuff in new or old space opera

CM: character in -- ? cass? city by Al Reynolds (alastair) - character mentioned having changed sex a long time ago

JH: justina robson's occasionally on edges of that & i think she's really interesting but i don't have time to read enough fiction in the way i want to. i've started reading her and am interested. i don't want to get into progress models but i do think different generations do things in different ways - different generational models. want to say something about feminism, not just about gender; sexuality ,race, class, and multiple other hierarchies of oppression, and so it doesn't have to be about - that doesn't have to be the lens to consider feminist theory-building to be organized about it necessarily

LS: gavin are you suggesting that space babe is a feminist building

CM: "living next door to the god of love" character who is a god

KJF: eleanor arnason's ring of swords is one of the texts i reaturn to a lot

MM: "light" which won the tiptree has elements. sometimes space opera that has so much going on if i were to look @ gender i would have to read again there's too much. but to go back to the point about gender not being main aspect of feminism; i sat down before this panel 7 said what have i read about in theory; and i made a list and i think you will be able to come up w/ sf that does something with every single one of those
bodies - technology - nature environment & assoc w/ feminism - language - race & colonialism - boundary & borde rblurring - power issues categorizing & universalizing -

KJF: is it possible to love a book which is absolutely offensive on its sexual politics. can you give me an example of a book that you love despite every moral fiber of your being.

MM: i find them useful & use them in my classes ... eg: 1972 a sentence that is not a character, a male writer wrote this, very well-known sf writer, the universal voice, "she handled the car skillfully, ofr a woman, particuarlyly for a beautiful woman."

aud: the fmeale man / joanna russ - does wonderful things for politics in terms of women's state of being, but also nasty things to say about transwomen that come straight out of janice raymond ...

LS: the first earthsea book. i actually have that more these days with movies.

KJF: my family is completely looking at me these days, 'are you crying?' of course not! nonsense

JH: sheri tepper's gate to women's country which i do love, but her feminism a deeply troubling feminism, eugenic, totalizing, that's scary, but there are aspects that are very seductive b/c of the parts i think she gets right, but i think she gets it right based on a completely dodgy & biologist premise that i wouldn't want to indulge for a minute. but when people represent it as a utopia i want to (slap myself on forehead); have you read it? some books that areally fucked but are also really satisfying to my feminist totalitarian, but i want other books that make me

MM: i will be trapped, b/c yes i have great problems w/ GTWC, but from stylistic, with the play, it works for me, and it also works as a teaching tool

CM: i do tend to react particularly badly to books that i disagree w/ the obvious politics of it but if the politics are bad i tend to hate the book but i have this awful feeling that there all these books that i really enjoy that if i sat down to think about the politics & gender assumptions i would hate them.

KJF: well we will go from here and work on our level of outrage and hopefully on our level of hopefulness.

(the end)

==External Links==

* [http://www.emcit.com/wordpress/?p=2591 Thoughts from Cheryl Morgan]

[[category:WisCon 30 Panels]]

Is Reading Feminist SF a Theory Building Activity? (WisCon 30 Panel)

2006-06-01T00:46:34Z

141.155.108.126: /* Transcript Notes */

==Panelists==

[[Karen Joy Fowler]] (moderator), [[Margaret McBride]], [[Lori Selke]], [[Joan Haran]], [[Cheryl Morgan]]

==Transcript Notes==

{{FillterNeeded}}

mod KJF: what brought you to sf & feminism

MM: subscription to science fiction book club as an adult.

LS: learned both sf & feminism at mother's knee; getting phd in chemical engineering while she was growing up. collision came when i read "when it changed" ... i was 18, 19, 20; an adult but not by much. that was the first joanna russ i ever read

JH: i also read sf & fantasy and all kinds of fantastic literatures as a child but once i went to college a sense of shame about that crept ... i continued to read fantasy. that makes no sense to me now. in early 90s i did a master's in gender studies. they gave us this very extensive reading list. this was my first encounter with feminism, was doing a master's in gender studies. one of the books was shulamith firestone's dialectic of sex. her thesis about taking reproduction outside the body seemed to me at that point incredibly attractive. the other thing she said was there was no utopian literature for women and i found that hard to believe. i thought that A) she was writing science fiction and B) there was other science fiction.

piercy & firestone, piercy & donna haraway

CM: introduction.

KJF: Watching [[James Tiptree, Jr. Award|Tiptree Award]] process several years & something has repeated itself several times. fresh jury begins discussing the kind of book they want, settles on the kind of book, the kind of experience they want. generally turns out they want to be reading [[The Left Hand of Darkness]] and want to be 19 years old. that's what they're trying to create. many many months and books later they begin to scale down their expectations and look for changes that are more subtle & have a less profound change in their thinking. i've seen this so many times that i've wondered -- at our age, and with our reading histories, is it in fact possible to have that experience again?

KJF: when was the last time a book really profoundly rocked you? how long ago was that? and what sorts of impacts do you find when you read now?

JH: sometimes reading a book doesn't have its impact on the first thing. i did work on starhawk. finally struck me that there was a male POV ... 1992, 93. the other text was ShadowMan - thinking about gender & sexuality, the way that melissa scott wrote about that, thrtu, embodying relationships made sense to me. that queer theory for example you can slip off the page when you read about something ... the bodily experience of those characters has done as well as it is in shadowman. that helped me to imagine myself and to imagine other others in a way that makes a lot more sense. so again roughly the same time. and there have been texts that approach that since then but i think that for me but part of it is having the time to go over and over a text, because i read fast, i'm plot-driven to start with, i have to know how the story turned out, and then i go back and read parts again that occur to me; i can't do that the first time b/c i read to fast. texts need to bear second, third, fourth, fifth readings to get rushes from them, to do theory-building. IMHO reading superficially one reading doesn't do that for me.

KJF: you said you came to these texts having nbeen taught to read for gender issues - would you say you've been trained to do that or is it a more natural way for you to approach a text.

JH: no it's efinitely training. my first degree was enligh shitory and the teaching was looking at a text in that context, and it was all class, come the revolution all will be solved, and gender was not an issue. like that point of my life like many women of a certain privilege i hadn't come across gender as a disadvantage, but then once i went into the workplace i realized oooohhh - things are different for girl. something about my social reality made it possible for me to realize reading differently - training - the other thing, in terms of theory building, it's not just about me reading the text, but about talking to other people about text, so it's not just about the text but about texts that can create conversations, and talking to other people who read differently, illuminates other stuff for me that i missed b/c of my own reading blinkers.

CM: one of the things that first struck me when i read the title is that sure reading is a feminist theory building activity but coming to wiscon is a really serious feminist theory building activity. in terms of recent books & things it's getting hard, this comes back to a panel we had yesterday: is feminist sf so five years ago. and to a certain extent we decided it was b/c things have changed. back when i was a teenager it was great to imagine a world with female pilots and presidents and fighter pilots and now all those things have happened. we haven't won the war but we're now fighting in the trenches not doing easy things like advancing across the land. but the type of book people can write now is different than the type of book people could write back in the 60s. plus when you're 19 it's easier to impress you with the big ideas & when you get older you get more sophisticated & ask more from a book. most of the books that have blown me away over past few years are literary style rather than content. probably river of gods by ian mcdonald b/c he introduces in that a character who has had a sex-change operation to become neuter; someone who elected to get out of the gender game altogether; and if you look at the book, it's all based on what actual transsexuals go thru, but rather than what someone goes thru mtf or ftm it's what somebody would go thru to have no gender at all.

LS: took a course in feminist theory in college taught by someone who was really really rigorous and i don't think then i've had that reaction to a story; b/c i'm hyper-critical, it's really hard to blow me away with a story; which is why i think we do it with a narrative to begin with rather than writing shulamith firestone - that's science fiction. narrative is to slip the ideas in and make you think wow and have it come up later but that doesn't work any more. John Kessel / Stories for Men. i read it as a book before it won the tiptree. for me it really did make me - it was the first sophisticated treatment of what it would be like for boys; the other side of a feminist utopia. it wasn't oh this would be horrible; it was hmm there are some sophisticated subtle effects. things i look for now yeah the big idea is great but what are some of the unintended consequences. and i can still be brought up short by that kind of book or story.

KJF: but less of a wow and more of a hmm.

LS: yeah but that's okay, i'm really suspicious of a wow; i'm really suspicious of things that are supposed to blow my mind or things that really did blow my mind b/c i tend to think i' being propagandized rather than really changing my thinking b/c i'm not being critical

MM: i teach freshmen in college; i'm still involved w/ the 19-year-olds. i'm teaching a class this time of juniors & seniors of all tiptree winners & hosrtlisted so getting a lot of that this time. but for my own personal reading it is a little more of the well that's an interesting question, hmm, where is that going to go and what would that do. so even if it's fairly subtle -- troll did some interesting things. i was on that jury. and troll did some interesting things for me as did sea of trolls by nancy farmer. which is a YA and i hadn't read a YA which was doing -- it was very subtle yet still some interesting things. ... TROLL what made it work for me - a gay man in finland who finds a troll and for various reasons falls in lust ? with the troll. how much is your sexuality affected by what you don't want to do, how much of it is a dark thing going on, and what really made troll work for me is the philippino mail order bride, and mail order brides, even tho most of us would totally cringe, they're an accepted part of our society, and how do we juxtapose that with the fact that everyone is so concerned that he fell in lvoe with a troll. ... as long as it's doing the theordore sturgeon thing, at least making me ask some questions, i'm willing ...

KJF: joan talked about a kind of text that leaves room for the reader, a participatory sort of reading as opposed to a text that walks you thru it; i want to discuss & add to it something that lori just said -- i wonder if part of being a feminist sf reader is a kind of innately confrontational reading, a sort of -- instead of slipping right into a book and being willing to go wherever the writer takes you, is part of the way we read is a kind of prove it, show me, let me think about it first sort of reading? speak at will.

CM: i picked up on it when lori mentioend it as well and was wondering whether being less trusting of gosh wow was actually an artifact of changes in society as much of changes in us becoming more suspicious and things. back when i was a teenager there was only one source of news in the UK; the BBC; so actually having science fiction novels that said things that the BBC would never say was interesting & important. now these days we have a lot of media, different versions of the news; possibly that's making us more suspicious in our reading & less willing to accept gosh wow.

KJF: will point out now feminist news channel

JH: one of the things i was thinking about when i mentioned that point was i think for me some of it is about narrative strategies in terms of leaving a space. it's not necessarily that you are engaged in a one-to-one conversation with the narrator. i personally love narratives with multiple POVs where in the interstices the gaps and the kind of disruptions b/w different narrative POV characters where you can see the stuff that doesn't fit - example - just b/c i've been working with it, gwyneth jones' LIFE, the narrative works backwards & forwards b/w these two different women; one a passive-aggressive scientist and this sort of camille paglia type cypher. jones is using them to look at different aspects of feminism, so sometimes they work as real characters, and sometimes they are much more advancing a politics. but b/c she is giving you those different perspectives, and ... she's giving you as the reader multiple points of identification and also the opportunity to have either one and follow the narrative one way or the opportunity to move b/w those points of view & have a much more complicated way first time thru which i'm generally too stupid to do

CM: everyone's too stupid to read gwyneth's books

JH: no this is why i have to read books over again b/c i do suspend my disbelief and i do get fully embodied, embedded in one of the characters, and it needs me to read it again to get those kinds of differences. in starhawk novel i was talking about there are two main female POV characters and those were the only ones i could read the first several times i read the book; it was when i finally read it several times and heard the voice of that other character. sorry i'm not just kind of rambling.

KJF: life is a really copmlicated and interesting book and my first time thru it i had - there's a rape and another great injustice of another sort as well and i was so focused on expecting that to be resolved in some way, the perpetrator to be exposed, the woman to come to some sort of action, and just waited for that - so to me one of the interesting things about it was to think, okay, that's not a necessary part of the plotline any more. it seemed to me - i'm not saying this very clearly - it seemed to me in the end much more real & interesting that it didn't resolve in the ways i longed for it and waited for it too and left me with much more to think about b/c it didn't

MM: when i was thinking ... of what i did woith my students, that's what happens when they move from fiction to theory when they start to ask themselves what does this has to do with my life? where do i see the fiction playing out in the things that have to do with me. again i'm working with fairly young people who often have read no theory so how do we move from the fiction to theory and i gess what i'm thinking is that the two work together - theory gives you language & a way to approach a particular issue and the fiction can also give you language & metaphor and a way to approach a particular issue.

KJF: this raises something i've been thinking about in terms of this panel & my life. when i had that early experiecne that your students are still enjoying, the book swere very useful to me in terms of my own life. it's been hard. the kind of sexuality issues in particular about an aging woman which are for obvious reasons the kinds of things i'm interested in now it's very hard to find books about those kinds of things to find what i'm experiencing now. so along the same lines as when was the last time a book changed something for you i've also added when was a book really useful to me. when i was first married and reading all that feminist science fiction it was would change me so completely that i was utterly unfit to live in the real world, my husband would tiptoe around and say let me know when you've finished that book, and there would be a very painful process of readjusting. but maybe i just don't let it happen any more, maybe it was too painful.

LS: some people use books for escapist purposes. finding something that speaks your language and lets you go somewhere else is a good thing. i don't get that experience reading but i'm also a writer and i do get it writing and that's why i do it.

MM: these were painful. i'm thinking of [[Kate Wilhelm]]'s [[The Funeral]] - one of [[Harlan Ellison|Ellison]]'s anthologies, [[Dangerous Visions]], and it was just PAINFUL to read b/c it felt uncomfortably true. and some of the other ones too where, they were very important for me, but also so discouraging of what i thought was going on in my life and what i thought was going on around me - i don't want hopeful books exactly but i want to feel what can i do with this book or this story that somehow changes the way that i'm thinking, changes the world around me, or sees a potentail way -- LIFE did some of that for me, made me think about things in a different way; it's not exactly a hopeful book, but at least it's not totally a funeral of all is lost, all is gloom, and funeral was that way for me.

JH: can i say something

KJF: please do

JH: one of the reasons i liked [[Life]] and it brings me back to other books - one of gold coast books / pacific edge - thinking about utopia as something fully formed and complete is wrong thing to do; utopia is about struggle forever; and that seems to me the best description of utopia that i can imagine; and i think for me that's useful b/c it is about process & struggle & movement. it's not perfect by any manner or means but it's - some of the things that she's doing with that are really useful, and that idea, struggle forever - so i think hope, hope is about, i think, being able to take action; you don't know how it's going to turn out but you think you can do. novels or any kinds of texts that help you believe you can do things are really useful. books aren't just useful to me to think about stuff, they're to help me hold myself together; that's one of the reasons i read to hold myself together b/c sometimes the struggle forever is about too hard. it doesn't always have to be theory; it can be about speaking to you or parts of you in ways that other parts of the world don't.

CM: maybe i'm just old & cynical but i've gotten to the stage where nobody else is going to hold myself together but me and i read books for other reasons the style or whatever. they occasionally say interesting political things but i no longer expect solutions from them.

MM: but even if it's a light little touch that makes me go this story couldn't have been written 10 years ago - there's a very light-hearted story, kissing frogs, and it's a story where a person who is transgendering puts a want ad to meet somebody, and the story couldn't have been written, couldn't have been published, i think 20 years ago, and the fact that it can and even be listed for a tiptree makes me feel hopeful about the world.

KJF: what about it makes you think it couldn't have been published then?

MM: i don't think a character treated very lightly, very humorously, that's in the midst of transgendering -- could that have been published 20 or 25 years ago? a story that treats the whole concept of transgendering and going thru that so commonplacely that it's treated humorously, i don't think that could have been done.

CM: certainly there have been characters for a long time, angela carter, i think the point you're making is that the character is treated sympathetically.

MM: the author didn't have to do a lot of work; b/c audience accepted it; and i think that's a hopeful.

KJF: i think a theory is that perhaps i'm too cynical

LS: cynical

KJF: easy for me to forget how much progress really has been made since i was growing up then and now b/c in some ways the vision that i got from these books was a sort of all or nothing, either we win or we lose, and i've been very surprised in some ways by the focus on masculinity - something i've begun to hear a lot about. because in the 70s when i was first encountering this stuff & hearing about it it was very clear to me it was for both sexes; partly b/c i had children; very clear that the male role was oign to have to change for feminism to succeed the way i wanted it to. the shock of feminism that women would work outside the home & come home & do all the work there as well was not what i was envisioning. what i longed for was such a deep & profound change that it's hard for me to take the pleasure in things that perhaps i ought to take in the things we have accomplsiehd.

MM: at that point i needed to have my consciousness raised. i was a very young woman who had been raised in a very stereotypical world and i needed painful and needed the rug pulled out from under me. i actually had a young woman write to me who was 20 who had never thought much about gender. student who wrote to her @ 20 had never thought of gender. i was probably there at 20 as well. problems int he world. i'm willing to read the painful works occasionally but i want them to raise questions for me. fantasy & sf for me are to disrupt reality but not to break it down so much that it can't be built back up.

CM: a couple of things in this clearly as you get older there's a lack of willingness to change, you have more to lose, the job the family all that kind of stuff. i like to think i'm not like that possibly b/c i don't have much to lose, no job, not much social status ... but i think after you've thrown yourself enthusiastically in something for 30 or more years everything involves people and everything involves people involves politics & is struggle & won't work the way you thought it would.

JH: don't know if it was what i said about masculinity you were thinking nabout. when i was reading WOTEOT and firestone it wasn't that men had to change, but it was that they had to change the way way i thought they had to change.

KJF: and so they should

JH: but i want them to change how i want them, not the way you - i don't care about you - and fiction reminds me of other POVs that are useful. but i'm a bit suspicious of linear progress models of history but also of subjectivity identity or whatever. but i have to keep learning and forgetting the same lessons over and over again. and maybe this is one of my kind of things about re-reading. a lot of the talk on the panel has been about fiction as a progression and i think you're making interesting and real and valid points about things being made possible that weren't possible before but going back to stuff written in another period of time is still useful now is one of the ways that i do theory. stuff doesn't have to be novel to be useful. i'm going to stop there.

KJF: the always amazing UKL. the last time i read TLHOD a couple of years ago i had a different kind of thinking about it. part of which was to some extent it is literally true, and i can't defend this very well, and i would have to defend male and female in ways i am incapable of doing, but her aliens become male or become female depending on the outer stimulus that's provided at the time, and that's something that we fit ourselves in as well - something that i was taking purely as grounded & a thought experiment i can now take in a different way

MM: we need to keep this in print b/c there are still people coming up who are 20 who have never thought about gender & need the painful works.

vonda: MM said a little while ago that you weren't looking for hopeful books ; is it impossible for a hopeful book to pull the rug out for under you. (confusion about hearing im/possible)

LS & MM: oh yeah it's possible

VM: i get pages with 300 of abuse of women and with blurbs that say you'll love this book and i don't think people needed to write that book after suzy mckee charnas walk to the end of the world.

KJF: there's your blurb right there: "didn't need to be written; go read some suzy mckee charnas"

VM: 300 pages of wallowing in the abuse of women to prove that abuse of women is bad, which, duh. he kept pestering me; publisher said but you don't understand vonda the way you can tell the bad guys is that they're abusing women.

MM: i agree with you but there are people who haven't read suzy charnas but they might read something new. so i think there are still some reason for those books to be written.

VM: but shouldn't sf go beyond that and have some attention paid to it beyond that's a hopeful book & i'm too cynical to read it

CM: i think there are plenty of good books around; that's not an issue. but at the same time i think there are people who need to be shocked out of their complacency, realize they aren't as well off as i am.

LS: hope is great it's the actual -- rearrange my thinking doesn't happen, and if it were to happen i would have to realize that someone was snowing me, but hope -- pandora experience here are tons of things being thrown at you

KJF: I would turn that around and ask you suzy mckee charnas' book aside, is there a book without hope that could still be a valuable book or would that not be a helpful experience.

VM: a book without hope (stuttering)

KJF: i'm thinking that would be a great title

VM: you can write it

KJF: i can write it, i can read it, i can publish it

VM: i've had the experience of writing what i thought were hopeful books nad being told i'm not a feminist. "You're a feminist?" not serious ... maybe the light at the end of the tunnel, light shining on us for last 30 years, is having an effect

gavin: thinking of [[Laurie Marks]]' fantasy series, bad things happening to men and women, yet hope that people will live together - trying to get beyond the cynical thing.

VM: not trying to say there shouldn't be bad things happening or even drama or melodrama in a book, but the assumption taht bad things happen b/c you're female or a kid, i just with my own work i want to get beyond that.

CM: laurie's book are an excellent example - in them, people working hard on politics, trying to learn from each other; that's particularly helpful b/c someone learning what needs to be done.

aud: add to that short story series of matter of seggri; i found that to be very powerful & very hopeful

aud: theory-building - lots of different aspects. one of them is 19yo experience, getting in touch w/ inner 3yo and make you say "why" - book sthat get inside me and shake of my theoretical base are books that see something that i've never seen even tho it's right in front of me - for me gwyneth jones WHITE QUEEN & north ... did that for me

LS: troll did that for me. i can't articulate my response to troll in any meaningful way whatsoever but it did make me go hmm.

MM: i'm not sure i can say why but the first thing that came to my mind were the stories that retell fairy stories and that made me go hhhh-- why was that particular trope always there in the fairy tale and what happens when we come at it from another point of view

KJF: it's not a text so i don't know if it's a fair responsen to your question or not but i have been of course as many of us have been living in the US for the last several years and i've become very conscious of the whole war narrative, we're going to war, we've been attacked, and the tremendous power of that storyline, and my reaction has been very much, what an unnecessary part of the world war seems to me to be but how much the people who aren't actually going toff to do the fighting seems to thrill to that storyline. not so much of the war itself but over the power of that narrative.

CM: i think a lot of the really interesting stuff i've read of late has to do with state of world, gender politicds. thinking of short story that --? wrote about iraq war; about bulldozing iraqi soldiers alive in trenches.

aud: in terms of where is tarted as a feminist sf reader to do and where i look for and what i look for -- id idn't know vonda was there -- but i started with dreamsnake, and it struck me as a very humane, and it was incredibly helpful, and it was a young woman character taking action in her universe for change, in a very loving & assertive way, and that was earthshattering for me at the time. and here i am 25, 30 years later, and having studied women's studies in college, the world around me today has become a place where the % of things that i thought were movable issues compared with the % of things i thought were intractable and things i thought were given have completely changed. i used to believe early on, that everything was movable and changable, and some intractable and i didn't have a bead on them and then they'd be movable. and i sit here today and look at the world - touched by venom did a lot of controversy - and part of the story is that women are horribly treated, and is this news, and i don't think it's news, but the reality is you don't need a book to find it, it goes on in places of war, poverty, etc. so now i find myself not just a place of movable intracdtable etc but hopelessness b/c maybe given is a bigger % than i'd ever considered based on biology & nature of universe and that's what has me reading now for things like joan said holding myself together as a person, as opposed to wows, b/c i'm getting wows for the world, and i'm all for a hopeful telling, and i think laurie marks' is a very hopeful view of the universe, but that given is scary.

matt austern: congentical agenesis of gender ideation - a story i recently read that said something about gender i'd never seen before. the first story i'd seen that asked what kind of mind you'd have to have to not see gender beofre.

KJF: impact on me, b/c how had i not noticed the gradations, 2 sexes, 3, four, and then i read that book and think oh right it's 25 or 30. also thinking about flexibility of sexuality in that book/story

gavin: read john varley short stories i'd never erad before, amazed to find, closest person to have written kissing frog story in 1976 if tiptree wasn't doing things like that. john varley now seems to write heinleinian space opera for kids with some gender stuff but ...

CM: i haven't read JV's stories myself but 2-3 years ago we had a panel w/ transgender issues and the message i got was it was superficial

gavin: and yet you can't change the gender of the charadcter even superficially without changing expectations of reader etc b/c you don't know waht author intended

gavin: another thing is there much of gender stuff in new or old space opera

CM: character in -- ? cass? city by Al Reynolds (alastair) - character mentioned having changed sex a long time ago

JH: justina robson's occasionally on edges of that & i think she's really interesting but i don't have time to read enough fiction in the way i want to. i've started reading her and am interested. i don't want to get into progress models but i do think different generations do things in different ways - different generational models. want to say something about feminism, not just about gender; sexuality ,race, class, and multiple other hierarchies of oppression, and so it doesn't have to be about - that doesn't have to be the lens to consider feminist theory-building to be organized about it necessarily

LS: gavin are you suggesting that space babe is a feminist building

CM: "living next door to the god of love" character who is a god

KJF: eleanor arnason's ring of swords is one of the texts i reaturn to a lot

MM: "light" which won the tiptree has elements. sometimes space opera that has so much going on if i were to look @ gender i would have to read again there's too much. but to go back to the point about gender not being main aspect of feminism; i sat down before this panel 7 said what have i read about in theory; and i made a list and i think you will be able to come up w/ sf that does something with every single one of those
bodies - technology - nature environment & assoc w/ feminism - language - race & colonialism - boundary & borde rblurring - power issues categorizing & universalizing -

KJF: is it possible to love a book which is absolutely offensive on its sexual politics. can you give me an example of a book that you love despite every moral fiber of your being.

MM: i find them useful & use them in my classes ... eg: 1972 a sentence that is not a character, a male writer wrote this, very well-known sf writer, the universal voice, "she handled the car skillfully, ofr a woman, particuarlyly for a beautiful woman."

aud: the fmeale man / joanna russ - does wonderful things for politics in terms of women's state of being, but also nasty things to say about transwomen that come straight out of janice raymond ...

LS: the first earthsea book. i actually have that more these days with movies.

KJF: my family is completely looking at me these days, 'are you crying?' of course not! nonsense

JH: sheri tepper's gate to women's country which i do love, but her feminism a deeply troubling feminism, eugenic, totalizing, that's scary, but there are aspects that are very seductive b/c of the parts i think she gets right, but i think she gets it right based on a completely dodgy & biologist premise that i wouldn't want to indulge for a minute. but when people represent it as a utopia i want to (slap myself on forehead); have you read it? some books that areally fucked but are also really satisfying to my feminist totalitarian, but i want other books that make me

MM: i will be trapped, b/c yes i have great problems w/ GTWC, but from stylistic, with the play, it works for me, and it also works as a teaching tool

CM: i do tend to react particularly badly to books that i disagree w/ the obvious politics of it but if the politics are bad i tend to hate the book but i have this awful feeling that there all these books that i really enjoy that if i sat down to think about the politics & gender assumptions i would hate them.

KJF: well we will go from here and work on our level of outrage and hopefully on our level of hopefulness.

(the end)

==External Links==

* [http://www.emcit.com/wordpress/?p=2591 Thoughts from Cheryl Morgan]

[[category:WisCon 30 Panels]]

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2006-05-31T23:54:55Z

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