Feminist Think Tanks (WisCon 30 Panel)

Panelists

M: Vonda N. McIntyre]], L. Timmel Duchamp, Janet Lafler, B, Laura M. Quilter (planned but delayed by plane), Susanna J. Sturgis, Liz Henry (added to replace Laura Quilter)

Panel Description

44 What Would a Feminist Think Tank Look Like? Politics, Religion, and Money•Conference Room 4• Friday, 8:45-10:00 p.m.

For decades WisCon has been an annual three– or four–day think tank for feminist SFF: people descend on Madison from all over North America and the world to pool ideas, experiences, and reading lists; these ingredients catch fire, combine in new ways, and are carried out into the world by recharged participants. In the wider world, feminism has been diluted into a laundry list of "women's issues," and feminists have dispersed into various movements and local projects. Many of us are isolated from each other, from recent feminist history, and from grassroots theory–making. What if feminism had a year–round WisCon? How would it work? Should it happen?

Transcript / Notes

Rough notes, typed during panel. Feel free to fix anything here or contact me directly and I can do it for you. - LH lizzard@bookmaniac.net

Vonda: intro

Liz - Am here for Laura Quilter whose flight was delayed. Brief description of the feministsf wiki.

Timmi: publisher, novelist

Susanna: The panel was her idea. Talking about feminism without having to explain why you're doing it. All year round feminist presence. So much forgotten. Pressure cooker for feminist ideas.

B.:: Feminism and women's issues/problems reframed in last 20 years as individual problems we're supposed to go off and solve on our own.

Vonda - Standing on shoulders of Le Guin etc. Door openers for us. [We want to keep opening those doors for others & future generations.]

Janet - Background in anthropology. Fan. No position in community except what people think of me. Interested in intersections of political/social issues. Ideally that's what think tanks are for.

Liz: Virtual part of thinktankitude. Think tanks can be events. Events that are documented. They are "instances of" the feminist think tank.

Timmi: We need a physical place like a math institute. A place for conferences and talks. Drop-in. People invited to do residencies there. In addition - also need virtual community. Physical institute is the face to it and is really important. You have to get away from your daily life. If it's all online you triage. It becomes less important and it's just another burden. This is an important lesson of wiscon. We have every sort of person across spectrum of feminism. Scientists, writers, [...] who have life experiences, artists, performers. Every kind of feminist of every age and experience, it's the conversation and making connections that can really work powerfully for us.

Susanna- One thing that inspires me - I came in on the tail end of consciousness raising. It was the core of 60s 70s feminism. Great mechanism. We lost something really mportant when it dwindled. One reason it dwindled - we thought once you were raised you were raised. People after did not get excitement of figuring out and building the skills. Then we got experts and the people coming in later became the secretaries. We need to decentralize .

Liz: Woolfcamp, unconferences, brain jams, event, house party, declare it and make a phsycial face to face event and then document the hell out of it and put it on the web.

Susanna - yah

Timmi - But we really need the physical institute.

B.:: important that [.....] What Susanna said about early CR feminist movement, free love, got pregnant at 19. World becaome diferent and issues became different. When I was juggling trying to raise kids and daily life, academic argument became irrrelevant and dysfunctional. What I see is the think tank becoming this room. Go back to your communties you're from even if they're not feminist communities. I work for a bank. My president knows I'm going to a femsf conf and he's fascinated. Male white 55 yr old bank pres. you CAN have that conversation with them.

Liz: That is a different thing that the focus and push forward and not having to explain feminism...

B.:: we need both

Audience member: We need both! There's not an either / or.

Susanna: There's almost no good idea that can't get screwed up by group dynamics

• general laughter*

Vonda: [....]

Janet: Taking these ideas and transforming them into action. Conservative think tanks. heritage foundation etc. How to frame the core of idea sn then funnel that into media outlets with which they are affiliated....

Janet: taking these ideas and transforming them into action. conservative think tanks. heritage foundation etc. how to frame the core of idea sn then funnel that into media outlets with which t hey are affiliated....

Timmi: there are other think tnaks though. the right wing...

Janet: yes there are. but the rw is more powerful at this point. part is having easy access to get these ideas out into the mainstream one of the strategies is ... on a blog recently if you have an idea percieved as outlandish... your goal is to make it seem merely radical and then reasonable... normalize it

• general audience murmur of normalizing, etc*

[someone] ... and I think of times I see that [normalizing] happen with ideas I find horrible and unthinkable... feminist ideas that I love should be pushed more into the mainstream

Vonda: can be coopted for good, just because a thing is evil doesn't mean the process is evil.

Janet: A thing in New York Review of Books about Jane Jacobs. Urbanist. Deep critic of urban design *nods from audience* in early 60s She was self tuaght largely, wrote on the death and life of great american cities. Activist for rest of her life.

audience: She stopped them building the highway thru manhattan, thru the village.

Janet: She just died a few weeks ago. Important women thinkers of 20th century a really weird list. rachel carson, julia child, betty friedan. thing that linked them in the mind of the writer is that they had a deep apprication of the forms of everyday life. that woudl be an interesting approach right there.

Susanna: I read Jane Jacobs early in college, and it made me look at how space affects how people relate. Era of 26 story high buildings, muggings, etc.

Audience: Does Martha Stewart qualify for this think tank? *hahaha*

B.:: This happens in media over and over, our quetions and interests get reframed. when Carly Fiorina lost her CEO job. When she lost it, articles over and over, would they ever give a woman a ceo job...again... then when Eisner lost his job I looked and looked... no article on man getting a ceo job again... hahaha

Susanna: it did not take a huge number of people to take over the republican party. There is nothing on the left, that gravitational pull, there is nothing keeping the democratic party. One of the mistakes from my youth, we latched ontno a good idea and we didn't get it that diversity was key. People can pursue a goal in different valid ways. Many things have to be going on at once. Ongoing battles in feminism. the era of separatism. We didn't all have to be separatists. Just having a pool of people who were experimentig on the edge, kept us who were closer to the middle asking questions. Am I giving up too much? Not everyone has to go off and live on the land.. or give up sex or have sex all the time. That increases the range of our imagination. we are missing that so much...

Euan Bear: the left... [missed it]

Susanna: and so much of that is happening on the right

Timmi: they've got just 15 percent,

Audience: Participatory democracy is harder than authoritarianism. It's [...] to incorporate so many divergent views. Which is why we look sloppy.

audience: Keeping the others in fear of loss of power. The others [moderate Republicans] are cowed, the Republicans, then boom...

Timmi: They 've got a real punishment system. It's ruthless.

Euan - power of naming

Liz: naming the problem?

Euan: no just naming. Liberals, feminists, we've been abandoned by demo party. WE need to identify ourselves as feminist as much as possible.

Vonda: and counter the propositions they make up

audience: We dont use the "radical feminist" [...]

Ellen Siegel : there IS a feminist think tank out there. Grace Hopper conference yearly conference. Women in technology. 5 years later she got funding for Anita Borg Institute, they give grants.. to further issues of women in technology. It's partly virtual and there are also conferences.

Vonda: God, what a perfect match for a bunch of sci fi women

Ellen: She had a brain tumor and died a few years ago and the instutue is still going. And no one in this room has heard of it. I wonder listening to it that why is it that no one here knows abot it.. why is it invisible?

Susanna: People who are active even in feminist print, if they don't know anything about feminism and sf and fantasy.... I'm still explaining what Wiscon is.

Steven Schwartz american enterprise institute.

Liz: pay attention to each other = important IN PUBLIC [What makes something important is that people pay attention to each other's work, and that they do that in public. The importance of public discourse to feminism. Conversations, public conversations. ]

Audience: Power of language. Using their language. Their framing. Not doing it on their terms.

Timmi: The importance of creating alternatives rather than being oppositional.

Lise Eisenberg: Anti-abortion vs prochoice ... language. the word "innocent"

• general hubbub about the use of the phrase "taking of innocent life"*

Lise: w/out using word feminism. Reclaim word feminism or not? Humanist. Simone de Beauvoir, women and human beings... what feminism is about, external navel gazing.

laughter...

person in audience: I was assuming people were thinking about things the way that i do. But I grew up reading sf books that belonged to my daddy... (!) My imagination is far out there... 1000 years in the future... [paraphrase: I judge people as being uneducated... irrational arguments] I don't get why they're doing what they're doing so i'm not effective in debate.

green scarf:. Liz something: That's part of listening....

B.:: Basic difference in ways people process information. One thing that confuses me is I can't see this piece w/out seeing this and this and this and this...

Audience: well DUH! [meaning, yes, we so agree and are like that too, not a "duh" directed at B.]

B.:: but most people can not only focus on just that one piece, they don't see anything else. And one woman I had problems communicating with. She had never understood that a whole is not the sum of its parts, it's how they interconnect... the point I want to get back to is we have the right wing manipulation of the world around us and the terms go down to that simple issue... b/c people make decisions on that simple issue.

Audience: the flood, the air, that is inevitable, that is your goal, to be alive.

[In a crisis, protecting self.]

Sheree: someone's going to survive and it's going to be me.

Susanna: Andrea Dworkin wrote "right wing women" , a really interesting book. I haven't read it since 1985. Her basic... She found the women she talked to who espoused very different [...] wing views basically had, understanding of things like dynamics between men and women on an interpersonal family level, not very different than left and radical and feminist. But the right wing women were much more pessimistic about nothing ever changing. Me personally, online, saving sanity... [isolated where I live...] if you are in a place where you are in a lot of ways solo, what your sense of your own possibility, that you can change, if it's just YOU... *nods, "yeahs" from audience* this is my first wiscon in 8 years... just the sheer sense of possibility: *more hearty assent from audience* What they chose from my speech from 9 years ago, Bernice Johnson Reagon, speech she gave in 1980, distinction between your home and the political coaltion work you do. She did something that was an issue. We would tend to mistake the home and the coalition. The coalition and politcal work is not nurturing and calm. You need a home base. A family home, a Wiscon or a group of people who support you. You need that to keep you going, but you can't stay there.

audience: You need a very long rope...to get out all those different places.. but a tether.

Susanna: the phsycial place the think tank, the connections, important. the popssiblitiey of doing that is greater than it hever has been.

Bunny: I've been a teacher. A guy who said "well, there really aren't any women's issues anymore... " and a guy who said he is anti-abortion. How do we answer these people? and the young people who think that feminism fixed it, or didn't fix it, but either way, that it's done.

Sheree: instances... hip hop girl... [i missed it... space... young feminists doing something... a positive step on a local level... not visible to everyone, but it's there]

audience - tall woman in back ... [I listened to what she said but missed typing it.]

Susanna: CR... absence of books... no women's studies books etc. The intense conversation, starting from scratch was very powerful. ....

[I lost the middle....]

B.: asks Liz her experience as a young feminist

Liz: I'm almost 40, married twice, one kid and two miscarriages, somehow not feeling like I qualify as a "young feminist" anymore over here

Joe Rodgers: The U.S. is in an undeclared civil war. A fear economy. I am trying to counter it with a love economy. Then it clarifies itself in that way.. what kind of future do you want to live in. [HP and stuff] [?? what? hp? hewlett-packard? harry potter? I forget]

Audience: Capitalism automatically "justification" for anything

Steven S.: [Something about workers and Marx...] What people are given for sort of... when I tried to educate myself about feminist issues, I was going back to books 10 and 20 years old. The think tank whether it be distributed or not, needs to be new. We need manifesting and calls to arms for this generation. [by this generation for this generation?]

Roslee: I was part of a think tank org by a rich man in Seattle. We were gathered to think about our areas of expertise and the future in 1000 years time. Not called feminist. But fascinating. The brains who are the brains of the universe.

Sandra: Feminism for dummies needs to say that ... femimism is recent, fragile, in an insxtant you can lose everyting. we must never lose sight of that.

Liz: So, the wiki. Laura Quilter's FSFFU pages, but rebuild them with a group and see what happens differently, collaborative process. Laura Q or I will show anyone who wants at Wiscon how to edit the wiki. Anyone can edit it.

Audience. What to do to make sure there are more women leaders. And all these women who are doing stuff are doing it.... They are not identified as feminist. The positive glowing feeling that people have for success. ... need to be represented as feminist.

Susanna: Adrienne Rich. When a women speaks the truth she makes it possible for more truth around her. ... deep down I don't believe people have flipped that much... the tiny minority just has more permission to speak.

Karen Joy Fowler: I heard on the radio a week or so ago, the part of the population least likely to go vote is unmarried young women.

Susanna: [.....]

KJF: Pat Murphy told me a story 20 years ago, that she saw a tabloid headline... "18 of your senators are space aliens". Her first thought is there are more space aliens than women in the Senate. The day that we have more women than space aliens in the U.S. Senate.

• • • • looking over this real quick I think Andrea Hairston was speaking a lot but i didn't know her name till later that evening so she is just "audience" 8-( - LH ****

Annotations and Extrapolations

What we meant to say, what we wish we'd said, what everyone wants to add to all that.

External Links

Just some things that look interesting & potentially relevant:

• http://www.saint-mike.org/apologetics/sifhr/whoweare.asp