Back from Wiscon

[oyceter]

I was at Wiscon! I think I go to fewer and fewer panels every year but hang out with more people. This time, I even convinced people to go to parties to find other people! CB laughed so hard when I told him that: "Whoa, you are being social and getting other people to do it too!"

The panels I was on mostly went okay, although I felt the Xenogenesis one had so much to discuss that we just skipped around from topic to topic instead of going in depth into anything, which was sad. The Cultural Appropriation from the Outside one was thankfully good and interesting according to various audience members, and while there were some ?!?! moments from the audience, we had a good mod and the discussion didn't get derailed. And sadly, I had the most trouble on Anime/Manga 101, which is... really not the panel I was expecting difficulty with. The male panelist basically just kept talking... and talking... and talking. And while he was giving out good recs, it was really obvious that he didn't have much context in terms of anime/manga genres and history. Also, while the mod was trying to end the panel, he kept talking about a scene in an anime, over the mod's "we're out of time" warning AND over all the noises of the audience packing up their things and preparing to head out. Seriously, WTF.

I am super happy I got to hang out a lot with troisroyaumes (I kept forgetting she does not live in my area anymore, WOE), colorblue, and qian, and I managed to grab various people for meals, but I still didn't get to talk to nearly everyone I wanted to! I also find it incredibly amusing that naamenblog lives in the same area I do, but the last time I saw him was probably at Wiscon 35.

The con is also much more media fan friendly than it was when I started going back in 2006, and there are so many more DW people now. I think there were several panels discussing fanfic that didn't have to do Fanfic 101 or defend it! Obviously there is further to go, especially for non-Western fandom programming. I think there were 2-3 anime/manga panels this year, and the audiences are bigger than in the past, but I want so many more!

I don't know the POC count or how it compares to previous years, but it was really nice to have an entire room full of us for the Friday night POC dinner, and even cooler that there are many people I don't know. And!!! N.K. Jemisin and Hiromi Goto are the guests of honor for next year!!! I am so excited!!! Bwahaha, I hope we hit record numbers of POC for next year. That said, the POC percentage is still embarrassingly small (probably not even 1% of the people at the con).

There also seem to be more trans* panels than the last time I went (2011), and possibly more trans* attendees? I know people have been working on carving out space here for a while, and I hope that momentum is building.

I also didn't manage to make it to any of the class panels, though I've heard good things about some (Race and Class in Urban Planning) and bad things about others (Class in SF/F).

It is still so frustrating, though. It is so easy to go to panels and have intersectional issues overlooked or never addressed, and nowadays, I am tired so instead of doing something, I just go talk to people I like or go to a different panel. Mostly right now I am complaining in the post-con surveys.

Aaaand... this is getting long, so I will save other comments for later.

Poll #13562

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 26

View Respondents

What panel should I write up first?

View Answers

Xenogenesis
6 (23.1%)

Cultural Appropriation from the Outside
11 (42.3%)

LBG Anime and Manga
11 (42.3%)

Transfeminism
3 (11.5%)

Trans* Bodies in SF/F
6 (23.1%)

Women in Science
8 (30.8%)

The Glitch Memorial Panel
2 (7.7%)

And: Hello everyone I met! Post-Wiscon exchanging of pseuds and whatnot highly welcome!

Also: Anyone want to brainstorm panel ideas in the comments? And do people have AMV recs? Anything is good, no matter how old; I've been out of the loop for a really long time.

Comments

[hebethen]

I started checking off boxes in your poll, realized I was checking off p much all of them, and stopped. Aha.

and I STILL HAVE NOT BEEN ABLE TO GET MY HANDS ON ANYTHING BY HIROMI GOTO. My life is tragedy. And I am embroiled in DRAMATIC INNER CONFLICT because um NKJ (robbed of a Hugo I tell you! robbed!) but then again the idea of going to a convention with a lot of people and not getting enough sleep makes me flip out so :')

[oyceter]

Oh noes! I embarrassingly have not read any Hiromi Goto yet either, but hopefully I will have by next year!

If it helps, I think it is entirely possible to do Wiscon while getting enough sleep and talking to a limited number of people, though it is difficult to avoid the crowds all together. I've gotten a bit better at that over the years, now that I don't feel like I have to go to everything in the schedule. That said, despite my intentions to do better on sleep, I failed miserably. I blame my roommates, who are entirely too interesting to talk to, for this ;).

[hebethen]

That sounds like the best kind of sleeplessness :P

[qian]

I know it's a stereotype of con-going that you end up with no sleep and lots of germs, but I have yet to fall prey to con crud, and I was very well slept! I think it helps to be super lazy and to go with a couple of close friends who enable your laziness. If it helps, there are also so few PoC at the con that it is super easy to pick out non-white people you have heard of on the Internet or otherwise*, and I am almost certain you'd be able to inveigle yourself an introduction to NKJ. XD

*At one point we were trying to look out for Ted Chiang, and I said to my friend who was looking for him: "He's the one with the greying hair."
Friend: "Where? Where?"
Me: "The Chinese one!"
Friend, later: "At first when you said 'the Chinese one' I was like, 'Yeah, sure, that's really helpful' -- and then I looked around and realised it was actually helpful!"

[hebethen]

a;ldkkdjf I think I would fall over Petrificus totalus style @_________@ And you know, that made me look up Ted Chiang's age and holy crap he's only a little younger than my parents. What. That scarcity sounds pretty extreme though! Is it a WisCon/Wisconsin thing, or an extension of SFF whiteness?

...I can do lazy, hahaha. I am a lifelong terrible sleeper and recent ?? brain problems??? though, so it's really a matter of whether I can convince my brain that a con is a special circumstance wherein getting less sleep will not actually cause me to never get a full night's sleep again and die of sleep deprivation etc etc. Experimentation is very SF.

[qian]

Is it a WisCon/Wisconsin thing, or an extension of SFF whiteness?

I dunno, but I think it is the latter? Because WisCon does get a lot of out-of-state visitors so it can't just be Madison being v. white. It is funny, because I and the people I was there with had, I think, fallen into thinking that most of SFF fandom was made up of what we thought of as the typical fan -- which was people like us: on the younger side of 40, and geeky about media and anime/manga and so on as much as SFF books. We had registered that perhaps most people would be white, unlike us, but I don't think we had quite realised that they were such an overwhelming majority. And that there is this whole parallel SFF fandom that is old and mostly convention-based and involved in different conversations -- you sort of know this theoretically, but it only comes home to you when you see it in the flesh!

[hebethen]

Curious! So am I to understand that SFF book fandom is separate from the stereotypical con-going Star Trek fandom?

[oyceter]

Is it a WisCon/Wisconsin thing, or an extension of SFF whiteness?

SIGH. Like qian said, SFF fandom, especially the set that deals more with books and publishing and less with media fandom, is SO WHITE. Er, sadly, the thing is that Wiscon (and SFF fandom in general imo) has actually improved from when I first started going in 2006, but there is a looooooong way to go still. I think the fairly recent influx of a number of SFF writers of color has helped, as well as the Wiscon itself getting more fandom friendly (mostly media fandom, though some of us are trying to push for more anime/manga stuff), but the inevitable backlash is also there as well. I.e. white people feeling like they are being crowded out when the POC numbers have gone from approximately 1% of the con to a whopping huge 10%. My eyes roll forever. It's a very classic case of how marginalized people are seen as taking up way more space than they actually are. The really sad thing is that I think Wiscon may actually be better at POC representation than other comparable cons (i.e. book-focused SFF cons, not media fandom or anime/manga cons).

[hebethen]

Welp. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that white people would get entitled and tetchy when they're demoted to such a demoralizingly low percentage by the PC police. Or whatever.

Media fandom = TV?

[oyceter]

Media fandom as... vague catchall term for primarily Western and English-language fandoms that are usually about TV with a scattering of other stuff?