Uncomfortable Politics in Feminist Writing (WisCon 30 Panel)

Panel Description

An exploration of the feminist politics of making the reader uncomfortable. We'll use obscenity, violence, violation of the body's boundaries, and dystopia as tools to explore feminist thought. Examples of books are the Kushiel series, Walk to the End of the World, Touched by Venom, and Air. (Or Monique Wittig's The Lesbian Body in which she describes mutual anatomical dissection.) For example, mainstream non-feminist movies and books often have rape scenes that are highly eroticized from the perpetrator's point of view. When these violations of body-boundaries are described from the point of view of the violated, it's obscene, it makes readers uncomfortable, and that's worth discussing.

Panelists

Cassandra Elinor Amesley (moderator), Paula L. Fleming, Liz Henry, Tea Hvala (not present), Geoff Ryman

Works Discussed

• Frodo & Sam's relationship
• mommy bloggers
• "28 Days"
• "The A-Team"
• Gregg Araki's "Mysterious Skin"
• "Silence of the Lambs"
• Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis Trilogy
• Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's Dart, Banewreaker and Godslayer
• Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren
• L. Timmel Duchamp Alanya to Alanya and Renegade and The Red Rose Rages (Bleeding)
• Mary Gentle's Golden Witchbreed and Ancient Light
• Nicola Griffith's Slow River
• Joe Haldeman's Camouflage
• Robert A. Heinlein The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
• Elizabeth Lynn's The Sardonnyx Net
• Maureen McHugh Mission Child
• Tricia Sullivan Maul

Transcript/Notes

Geoff Ryman - (... initial comments missed ... ) when characters are weak - that's the kind of discomfort that's really useful

GR: a few things that push my button - I personally as a writer not a reader have a real strong need for autonomy, independence, so when I'm reading about a character particularly a female char who still lets herself be dependent on others ... particularly Maureen McHugh's Mission Child b/c you have a woman who comes from a culture where everyone depends on everyone else & she's taken from that culture and put in an urban environment and she keeps depending on this person and that person and everyone keeps letting her down and ooh I wanted to smack her - perfectly understandable where she was coming from - so that's one thing as a feminist, how do I deal with characters who aren't standing on their own two feet.

GR: another thing that interested me on this panel - the issue of victimization - horribly shitty things can happen even to very strong people -and even very strong people can make mistakes and how do we make that work in a way - example in program book was rape but I think any number of things can happen to make someone a victim w/out losing sympathy for them. ... just like juries in rape cases tend to pull back, you don't want to identify w/ victim ... how to do victim and still portray as a strong sympathetic person.

mod Cassandra Elinor Amesley: I hate it, get most uncomfortable when people I know about are invisible. Obviously I don't get uncomfortable where I have a blind spot. I get uncomfortable if class/economic background is not foregrounded or is misrepresented. Certainly gender things like that. Like most writers I write b/c I have stories to tell and I want to tell them but I also feel hopeful that some of the info motivates someone someday to be as angry as I am. So those are my motives for making people uncomfortable & for writing general

mod: Now if we can talk about maybe what got you interested in this panel or what thoughts triggered - what made people uncomfortable.

GR: the awards last year for the year before, Tricia Sullivan's book, a book called Maul, set in a shopping mall but spelled maul, and it's an extremely violent book, and very very uncomfortable, starts out with a young, one wants to say totally consumer-oriented, girl masturbating w/ her gun, ... an incredibly violent book and made me feel incredibly uncomfortable because I didn't know the extent to which I was invited to take it seriously & the extent to which I was invited to enjoy it b/c it was unenjoyable ... women shooting women and lots of innocent bystanders and I just didn't get it ... then cuts to a formally ... book ... brilliant ...a man in a cage ... then the two stories converge in a completely ... but the first third of the book ... thought if I can stick with it I will understand it ...

GR: stuck with it

GR: first of all I as a clarke judge ... you don't get many real science fiction novels ... had fantastic written power

mod: would you have been as uncomfortable if it was men shooting men

GR: yeah. ... I was more uncomfortable b/c it was a woman writer and I sensed there was some kind of critique going on ... if it were a man writer I would have said it was just shit ... someone who said that ... it was shit ...

Liz Henry enters - sorry... late... "I blame the patriarchy"

mod: we started already; first question is what's dear to your heart in terms of changing things ... answer would be useful especially as you're probably still thinking

LH: You mean why it might be useful to make people uncomfortable?

mod: No, what do you want to change? Why do you care?

mod: As a writer

LH: I want everybody to have a voice and to not be afraid of making mistakes and to speak up and see what happens and for everybody to speak up and change what they say... I want people to step down from expertise and authority and to speak individually and to arrive at collaborative conclusions ...

mod: Very good for someone just getting off an elevator! second question is what did the name of the panel trigger for you in terms of thoughts that made you uncomfortable

Paula Fleming I probably answered this a little in the first go-round ... as far as what I'd like to change: one of the things again as a feminist writer i feel i guess rather impishly or perversely inspired to do in my work is to try to question what i think of as conventional liberal politics or conventional liberal thinking as much as i am part of that myself. and that means sometimes making a litlte bit of fun particularly of liberal white middle class do-gooders who wantn to help minorities and that kind of thing and i do turn the tables and poke fun ... particularly liberal white middle class people who have never met the people they want to do good about ... b/c that's my real life ... interview people who want nto work in a natural foods coop ... a lot of them are great people but i also meet a lot of people who are really liberal and want to save the world but have probably never really spoken w/ a homeless person b/c that would be icky

lh: i never know what to do ... start engaging ... that woudl be do-gooding on them ... example, the PTA, the middleclass / upper middle class people have in their mission to make the poor people AKA the latinos eat healthier in their home b/c they have bad cholesterol and their children will be fat ...and they have bad body images ... and it's certainly noble to want to eat well but the juries out on what that means ...

fem: of all the things that people have to worry about, pizza on the lunch menu has to be right up there

mod: ... asking liz about what you've done to make people uncomforrtable ... deferred till later

geoff: story set in a concentration camp ... deliberate attempt to break up .. very prevalent in the 80s, so definitely that one ...

mod: and how did you know they were uncomfortable.

GR: the strange thing is that actually nobody was. it was timed well enough that everyone just said yeah ... you're so down on violence ... having to be black or brown, it was that kind of thing, very nightmare image, slightly surrealistic, and seemed to pull together and not offend anybody ... which is if one is congenitally ... ? blight? is one's fate ...

mod: sad. I am not published in fiction yet, I'm a poet, but I have been writing for a couple of years a particular story that I have taken to workshops. It's what I would call a very straightforward issue -- a story written from a first person point of view with two protagonists reporting what happened. One of them is someone named Miro (Miram?); the other is from a culture which does not distinguish by gender. So for the first couple of chapters you do not know what gender Miram is b/c a lot of people assume Miram is a female name b/c of its background ... The people who read were all upset: they wanted to know what gender Miram was and they wanted to know now. They were very clear that story wouldn't sell -- they wanted to known did he have balls or could he have children ... referred to as he so one character Miram is attracted to is refererrred to as a brother by his alassi friend ... definitely a woman by Miram ... whether she/he is romantically available is an issue. And again a lot of confusion from readers about - you've got to pick something that fits whatever gender this person is. Something I don't feel is necessary and something that puzzles me.

aud: are the people making these suggestions in the publishing world.

mod: some of them yes but hang on to the questions.

PF: i find that if i'm writing from male point of view b/c i have a female name and my name is on byline if i start as "i" people will assume female unless i give them a clue very quickly ... now it sounds like you're talking about point of view from someone who doesn't distinguish. that's a different issue. unless it's critical to story i will relieve reader's discomfort. quickly so i can tell the story i want to tell. ... other ways i've made people uncomfortable ... feedback i've gotten on stories. i've had one editor tell me a story was sexist b/c the man in the story boughth the woman a piece of clothing so she could go out to a nice restaurant w/ him b/c he was a very successful person and she didn't make a lot of money ... i've been in relationships where [money differentials], i didn't see it as a sexist thing but i guess it pushed someone's button ... what was the question again?

mod: i guess you just answered it. go back to liz

liz: yeah i thought of something to say. i guess i'd say i nblogging especially but even maybe before that crossing lines of public/private ticks people off, fuzzing or blurring boundaries makes people flip out b/c boundaries exist for good things so crossing them makes people perturbed. public/private is revealing too much information, exposing anything messy, violating someone else's privacy ... people are always concerned that by violating my own privacy i'm violating someone else's privacy. not respecting their boundaries. so if i talk about my feelings about my life, my preganncy that i'm violating my son's boundaries or my mom's etc. that just sme saying these things is ... dialog happening very heavily in mommy blogger community ... a lot of very intense feminist c-r is happening in that field. people are very concerned to protect you from revealing too much about yourself - they want to protect you ... and obsecenity is the other big thing. violence can be obscdene, sex can be obscene - what is obscene ... i think other things can be obscene, like wealth. like my 401(k) can be obscene.

mod: so the question for the panel is it good to make someone uncomfortable

GR: you can't have a good story without making someonen uncomfortable. pornography makes people very comfortable they don't have to think ... otherwise ... stories that will have to make them think make them more resonsible

mod: so you would have been disappointed when story you wrote did not make anyone uncomfortable

gr: it did provoke conversation ... for a very limited time, it's av ery dated story, but it did have a specific function for at ime

PF - yeah absolutely i want to make people uncomfortable unless i'm writing bedtime stories to help people fall asleep. yeah if i'm not - otherwise for me at least it's like what' the point. we have available to us so much media between the media & 200 channels of mostly shit on tv and all the rest of it there's so much info there there's no reason for me to add anything to it by writing a story unless i've got something to say that will take our thinking beyond that ... another thing that makes me really uncomfortable is financial insecurity. reading air right now, this character keeps losing her way of making a living ... and god that's making me nervous. one way to do it. way too often in our genre we assume that our characters have way too unlimited iresources...certainly our prince who goes off on adventures has no real problem ... may go hungry for a night but not really a problem ... horse in armor ... maybe one way in our highly material saturated culture

LH: who is it making people uncomfortable b/c maybe people who have something to lose are uncomfortable ... people who are poor maybe aren't uncomfortable

Paula Fleming: in our society if you took away somebody's tv that could get really edgy, you know

gr: in england the average wage is 25 thousand pounds a year but a lot of people are making 10 or 11 - the net result is lots of debt and the number of people making less with a huge person ... so maybe rich person reading would be uncomfortabe but if i'm reading it it's making me uncomfortable b/c that's a situation i'm in

lh: so maybe being out of control is ...

mod: if making people uncomfortable is making your story less easy to sell there's going to be a lot of writer angst there, in the slash sense of angst.

lh: on the other hand i'm not going out and watching movvies where women get raped and scream b/c that makes me uncomfortable but i'm not challenging myself there ...

mod: noticed that people who go to class panels think class is an issue, people who go to motherhood panels ... we don't go very far out of our way ... b/c first you have to sneak up on them

PF: liz raised a really good point b/c there are different kinds of discomfort b/c sometimes something can just be really sick or icky

mod: like homosexuality?

pf: for some people it would be. ... maybe this is not a way people don't want to grow ... i can't sit here and tell people how to grow ...

GR: hororr movies. i stopped reviewing movies b/c you really do get sick of movies w/ a 17yo girl being tied up w/ barbed wire and a cigarette ground out on her back ... and you can't find any purpose ... i don't think the people doing it are identifying with the victims; who are they identifying with ... and then you get Silence of the Lambs which is billed as a feminist horror movie but it's a slash titty movie ... i think they did track the problem of a trained competent person terrified out of her wits, they tracked that well, but all they did was dress up a slash film.

[discussion of film vs. book. ]

GR: but they did get competent female fear, they got that.

pf: yeah that's hard

mod: it's tempting to go into female gaze / male gaze but i'm going to push that to production. i picked homosexuality ... because it's one close to my ehart and i have had various students where i showed movies like my beautiful alundrette because in this case they can't deal with male on male romance. ... male on female romance earlier they felt apparently quite comfortable watching. so it becomes unsatisfactory to make them too uncomfortable because they'll shut down. and i'm wondering if you see a place where you negotiate choices between not too uncomfortable but beyond the boundaries of the comfort zone so they start noticing that in fact they have a comfort zone which is the first step.

pf: i think that is so hard because i think you face that ethical dilemma - you see it when people try to make war movies - i see it when i try to portray any kind of act ov violence sexual or other in a story - on the one hand if i sanitize it i'm not doing it justice, like The A-Team -- bullets flying everywhere they don't fall down or they fall down but you don't see blood. I hate that fake violence, that's wrong, there needs to be real violence, it needs to be awful, it needs to have real consequences. But if you go too far into it it runs the risk of being gratuitous or runs the risk of being the 17 year old ... barbed wire ... cigarettes ground ... and that's not right either. and i think every scene like that, use your own best ethics to try to get the telling points across ... really hard ... you may never get it right for every reader.

GR: ... when i'm writing stuff, i'm ... am i being prurient, because i'm a human being too ... pretty warped... so all i can do is test-drive: "is this prurient", if i think there is, that's when i think this is the wrong kind of discomfort. so similarly i can only police my own reactions. If i think i'm really getting off on the violence then i think that's the wrong kind of discomfor then I shut down. The embarrassment I feel with the 17 year old - then I feel being asked to identify - that's prurient.

mod: the thing i've published slash, definitely erotic element, deliberate; one worries ... wanted to deal w/ class issues; found erotica was a great way to make people focus on class issues b/c they would read it for the sex and this way stay to think about in this case Frodo & Sam's inherent subordinate relationship. So would that fit in with your definition of prurient?

GR: slash fiction i've read is anything but prurient ... asked ... completely closeted ... asked to come to a room read about this much (gestures with hands spread about two feet apart) slash and as a gay man say whether it was realistic ... never imagined that people would want to slash ... but forutnately one of their little boys was in the room so nobody would say anything and then it took ages, just like gay lib, none of them would come out as writing this stuff. .... but they got the physical stuff completely right, on anal sex, but they did over-romanticize male-on-male relations.

mod: male-on-male slash is for women to have fantasy men who are useful for women's sexuality ... wondered a little bit. at this point i'm going to open it to questions from the audience in whichever question you want to the question in.

aud: Think of a sf/fantasy text that's made you uncomfortagble, and whether it still makes you uncomfortable.

mod: Heinlein's Moon Is a Harsh Mistress which I read in high school and I'd never thought of world in a political way before Heinlein and he makes some arguments which are shocking like individuals should have same right to execute as governments ... even though I now recognize it as more fascist than anarchist.

pf: trying to narrow it down to one example. one of the things i love about this genre is it so often makes me uncomfortable at least temporarily until i readajust my parameters ... i'll raise an example, mentioned in the program ... Kushiel's Dart series a little bit at least to start off with. and then you get used to it, the point of view of this particular character ... and then my parameter is shifted a little bit.

lh: of course i have a list like i'm sure everyone ... but i would mention actually speaking of Jacqueline Carey the Godslayer and Banewreaker boooks made me a little uncomfortable because i had thought of Tolkien and the race etc and i thought ooh why was i not aware of this and made me uncomfortable with my own lifetime of being blind about this. Another book would be Timmi Duchamp's Alanya to Alanya and [{Renegade]] coming out soon which was fantastically uncomfortable in a really great way. imprisonment and i read a lot of prison literature ... and the imprisonment that also happened in The Red Rose Rages (Bleeding) is bleeding and the interrogation prison scenes b/w women and the women analystic torturer captive were so intense and a really really good read makes you think about a lot of things. but difficult to keep reading. made me think a lot of things about my own life and ... seeing the depth to which i'm subject to patriarchy is almost unbearable ... the pressure of double consciousness ... it's almost difficult to bear and makes you go a little bit crazy until you cn integrate.

aud: a book to add to list .. .Dhalgren by Delany. it's so beautifully written but it's gritty in a way i'm not used to reading. i'm not used to reading a book about conscious of fact that this character hasn't written a book in a long time.

katie: I'm sorry there's a couple of people who had hands up before you.

GR: I responded to paul a lot more uncomfortable about mainstream novels because they tend to pin me down much more horribly in here and now. terribly engineered choice in real world. ... Maul really distrubed me partly because i couldn't account for it.

lh: lori selke told me to read it so you should talk to her b/c she loved it passionately.

pf: a novel that disturbed me greatly was Nicola Griffith's Slow River. Absolutely very disturbing exploration of power dynamics on various levels.

aud: speaking of things that make people uncomfortable i remember being in movie theater watching 28 Days later a fully naked man in hospital with full frontal nudity ... audience with nervous titters & palpable unrest. i wondered about it - obviously - just grow up people are uncomfortable about this but listening to panel i'm trying to unpack who and why and obviously elements about het women being homophobic but also i wonder about het women in movie theater being forced to confront male sexual organs. but another dimension i also wonder about in our society the nude male body, the male penis can make people nervous.

lh: the female penis can make people nervous too

aud: nudity too can just make people nervous

GR: i think there's a certain vulnerability when people are naked in front of the camera and can't move. that vulnerability is highlighted when it's a male because we're not used to seeing it.

aud: working on a story for a while. definitely make most people uncomfortable because written from alien point of view not human but doesn't have a gender but can take on either gender when it interacts with other races. curious if you've seen others

last year's tiptree winner Camouflage (novel) ... Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis Trilogy.

pf: taboos around male nudity female nudity ... I also write erotica as sf/f ... When I was at Clarion one of my instructors was Samuel R. Delany ... He gave a reading as was traditional; he read some of his highly erotic work. One of the students asked him why do you write about sex so much. He said I guess I see sex portrayed a whole lot in ways that are really unrealistic so I want to talk about the way it really is. So even when I'm writing erotica I describe bodies like real bodies not idealized bodies because I think they're sexier ... women have dimples in their butts and little potbellies.

lh: zits

pf: i don't know about zits that might break the mood. and i portray sex the way it really is because i think that's much more interesting ... in tv we see it over & over that two people their eyes meet boom they get horizontal and have perfect sex. excuse me? i don't think so! so all the awkwardness 7 clumsiness that can go into encounters i find interesting & revealing.

lh: i have a question - liked question about think about what you found uncomfortable ... productive discomfort vs. what you found yukky and uncomfortable.

aud: film Mysterious Skin (film i don't remember ...film by Gregg Araki. male homosexuality and child abuse difficult movie to watch but also really wonderful. a productive kind of discomfort. so i would recommend it highly.

aud: a very interesting sort of productive discomfort that i've found when i'm readina a text and it doesn't work. and it keeps needling back in tyour heart. 15 years ago reading a female gothic - normally sorts out in the end ... got to the end of this one and the ghost didn't work ... ghost wasn't ... eventually it was so productive i got half a phd out of it ... it took that long to explain why it didn't work ... it wasn't that it was bad ... it didn't work ... not badly written ... "passive many shadows" ?

aud: as a reader i'm making an agreement with author that i'm here to learn or just be entertained. a book that made me horribly uncomfortable in a way that i've never gotten over because i think it broke the compact i don't know if you remember an english author called Mary Gentle who wrote Golden Witchbreed - the ending of Ancient Light took the entire two books and just took your legs out from under you, i don't want to spoil it too bad if you've never read it, basically she killed her world off; years later it's physically upsetting to me that the characters that i came to love and the planet ... and it broke the compact but as i get older and ... ultimately out on the limb can you trust me ...

aud: Ancient Light is one of those amazing books ... the thing that was so traumatic about is that it was a post-colonial novel ... destruction is brought on by outsiders who come into this world. at the end of it all the people on the world you've come to love just get killed ...

GW phenomenally well-written

aud: novel extraordinarily well written satisfying in its denouement but character ... made me uncomfortable in ways i did not find productive - is that the term we've been using? - The Sardonnyx Net by Elizabeth Lynn - there's a character in there who is a sadist; he derives great pleasure from causing pain to people for political purposes; he's foiled in part by his sister who's also in a power regime. the novel is well constructed. she has i think accurately captured the psychology of the guy. but i don't know that i would want to read that novel again and experience through his eyes the pleasure he got from the actions he took.

mod: reminds me of - i was influenced by John Gardner on moral fiction. i was academically trained writer - in all these writers' workshops. most of the people in these workshops were outraged at the concept that you're accountable for your production. the idea was pure text. art and artist sinteract and produce an ideal work and it has nothing to do with expect - audience should not be involved except afterwords - result is that some people seem to me to write into the universe really negative things - not what you're describing about not getting it in the Maul - you might be able to trust them and

mod: see what they're doing

mod: but for many people the only reason is pleasure or spectacle - i was wondering for writers here if you feel you're accountable to a community & if so what

GR; i think i'm accountable in the sense that as soon as i use fiction to try to recruit or sell them my vision or whatever agenda for good or ill i'm probably breaking compact with reader. i don't know about community but i think reader comes to work - so as actual experience there - it either ratifies experience they've had or they're coming to a book because it's a way of life they haven't had and they want to be free to trust the narrative to form their own narrative. i also police my work to see if i'm trying to use my fiction to show them. ... i think it would be wrong to set things right ... the bargain is you're going to love this, be totally unchanged ... that's entertainment and there' snothing wrong with it ... the other is literature. the compact is (literature) that i'm working as hard as i can to create a complex interesting picture of reality to work through issues or things in the world ... it's a platform for them to imagine their way through a set of issues & problems. anything else i should be writing an essay, a critical - and i probably should be

lh: thinking vague thoughts again about blogging & diaries. nothing to do with science fiction.

GR: online community

LH: with online communities people start to have expectations of you. i do feel intense pressure to "keep it real" a weird line that people will be offended not by political opinions but by details of my personal life and if i don't feel them then i feel i'm betraying truth.

GR: ... one to one ... absolutely implicit ...

LH: but i actually think about that, i don't want to be entertainment. question. that's part of what makes blogging, can be literary.

GR: but what's interesting about blogging is that it is an online community, audience is online producer

LH: ... as far as fiction i'm still thinking about online fiction, Renegade. like Mary Gentle, your mind is blown.

pf: whole discussion aside - i have to think when i'm writing my only responsibility is to my characters - and being a true voice for them - and if i'm in a right place i won't betray the standards & values & ethics of any community whose issues or point of view i may be trying to respresent in a work of fiction. but that's not something i can force thru technique or craft; it has to arise from my stance as a human being before i sit down at the computer. my heart & gut have to be in right place & then it has to be about the characters.

mod: killing off a character is hard ... you are creating a living breathing person in a way and you should feel responsibility, even if you kill them for the betterment of the plot ... one character i was happy to kill because she was a bureaucrat ... but once you understand them it's hard to not feel for them. ... once i've created a reality, that reality exists in its odd fictional way, and if you create a fiction that says there is no hope, there is no possibility of change, you are doing something extremely immoral, and i wouldn't do it, and i wouldn't do the thing that makes me feel that way.

pf: i agree - if something is a big long downer and says that life sucks etc. - i can read the newspaper for that.

mod: and it's not true - with exception of entropy which will get us all one day

aud: i've been distrurbed ever since panel about women writing about gay men. rape is eroticized. we've come so far since Susan Brown-Miller. i didn't know what slash was or japanese thing was ...

mod: come tomorrow at 10 when i actually talk about slash. it's not that all slash is ritual rape or bondage and other eroticization of volence. serious bondage and rape and murder as part of the process. but there is a significant body of work that does that.

lh: very interesting that slash that fanfic labels its stories thusly so that you're warned. so this story is noncon (nonconsensual), romance, chan, etc. darkfic. people labeling because they know it might be wrong ...

mod: they killl off women too.

... mod to bring it back to discomfort liz's point is really good to lessen the discomfort they put it all out there but they warn you in advance. the belief is that your accountability is just to warn somebody ... no accountability for creating a universe where rape is a first step on the way to a relationship.

lh: that's what fanfic community was basically accusing me of, something akin to rape, that by longlisting Arcana (fanfic) i did something horrible to E. Brunson; by labeling, people were very concerned right from the get-go ... the first question that came up was, "did you warn her that you were longlisting?" that would never come up with another title. It's a different community ethic that has developed...

mod: .... fanfic discussion.

GR: so they're writing something about noncon sex and then they're upset that somebody didn't ask their permission for longlisting it

mod: that's a really good example.